Welcome to
We are a social innovation agency that is shaping an awesome future – bold people, organisations, and companies get us on board to create products, services, and experiences that matter to humanity.
Why Super Being?
“WHAT IF WE DESIGNED A WORLD THAT TRULY ENABLED THE BEST OF HUMAN POTENTIAL?”
Every one of us has immense potential, it’s about creating a system that unlocks it. At Super Being we’re on a mission to do exactly that. We can’t do it alone though, we want to work with bold people to create meaningful innovation that puts people at the forefront of a new system.
So, if you’re a leader who is motivated to do good and do well, and have a challenge you want us to work on, we’re here for you. Just imagine what you can create when you have designers, product people, technologists, creatives and strategists all working together towards a big purpose.
- Everything we do has to be to further our mission of making people’s lives brilliant.
- Maintain perspective – nothing is as important as something that is important.
- Laugh – be laughing, be laughed at, just have a laugh. It helps with the point above.
- Be childlike smart – imaginative, adventurous, curious… any other way is dull.
- Listen – always be listening, so that we’re always learning and more likely to be able to help.
- Never stand for mediocrity – don’t believe in averages, they’re useless benchmarks. Like asking a loving mother if your work is great, you’re never going to get an honest answer.
- Collaborate – learn to work with others to make things happen.
- If you look back at the end of the day and can’t honestly see your contribution, then you better make tomorrow nothing like today.
- Be fearless – stand for something. We should never be worried about being judged or failing.
- Every project should take into account the unintended consequences and these should be minimised.
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O2 Smarta 100
+ Runner-Up for Best People Business
Super Being Labs -
WayraUnLtd Winner
For our social enterprise
State of Ambition -
Big Issue Invest Tech For Good Winner
For our social enterprise
State of Ambition -
Diversity UK & KPMG
Top 100 Asian Stars + Top 5 Start-ups
Darshan Sanghrajka & Super Being Labs
Our Services
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Why work with us?
The best innovation comes from unconventional thinking. Social innovation requires dealing with complex systems. Turning those problems into extraordinary opportunities comes from being an entrepreneurial team who are able to pull things apart, to be curious, to ask the tough questions, to apply next-level creativity, to be different, to see patterns where others don’t, and to look silly when needed. When you have a team who can blend imagination, creativity, and strategy together, and who have the capabilities needed to turn an idea into reality – big things are possible. Clients such as Breast Cancer Now, Telefonia, the Cabinet Office, Oxfam, BNP Paribas, and many more – all have come to love our way of making things happen.
You have to ask yourself – do you want a PowerPoint at the end of your investment or do you want to be designing a better world?
IF YOU’RE BOLD, LET’S GO!
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70/30 – skin in the game – invest in the future with us
We are so driven by what we do, we make sure we have skin in the game too. As a client, you fund 70% of the project and we fund 30%. When we hit the desired outcomes, you can then pay us the remaining 30% or invest it in further work.
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3 ways to incubate your challenge with us
Our clients come to us because unlike normal agencies, we handle everything like it’s our own venture – from conception to launch and beyond. You invest in a Super Being team made up of a diverse group of multi-skilled people and we deliver an outcome.
1. Jump-In
Do you want to jump in and solve an immediate social challenge or enhance an existing innovation to make it greater for humanity? (Imagine if tech companies had invested in a team who could spot the unintended consequences of their innovation and then helped them design digital products that do good without the harm?)2. Think Long
Do you want to focus on long-term change by finding opportunity areas for innovation that helps give the next generation the greatest chances and opportunities?3. Super Being Arts
Do you want to use the arts to inspire people? We’re doing through film, photography, literature, and theatre. Internally we are currently writing original content, have a studio at Pinewood through our production partners at Turtle Canyon Media, and are building a theatre school that will disrupt the sector for the better. Join our quest. -
As a company, what can I do with Super Being?
BlackRock’s Larry Fink rallying cry in January 2018 asked companies to make a ‘positive contribution to society’. He is totally right – you can do well and do good. CSR is just a sticking plaster, you can do so much more. We’ll help you find this strategic purpose and then work with people (it could be your employees, your customers, or the communities you work in) to co-create innovation that is needed, that provides an opportunity for growth and that is aligned to your core capabilities.
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As an organisation, what can I do with Super Being?
Whether you are a charity, a social enterprise, a university or an industry body, you have a social mission and you work hard at it.
Let’s work with you to see how you can do things even better in order to reach your goal quicker and with long-lasting impact.
We’ll then help you turn those ideas into sustainable reality.
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As a government, what can I do with Super Being?
Politics is drifting to the polar extremes. Democracy only works when everyone has a voice and that voice is heard.
We can help you do things better by designing sustainable services that are built around individuals in a connected way.
Imagine that?
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As a philanthropist, what can I do with Super Being?
You’re a superhero – let’s make something wonderful happen.
If you have a social cause you really care about, bring your resources and influence to the table and work with us to make something awesome.
Or maybe jump on
board with an existing project we’re working on? -
Support our own products too?
We think up ideas in our lab and then make them happen. These always start off as Super Being Experiments and then with much testing, tinkering and thought, they turn into full-on products and services. This is how our digital social enterprise for young people – State of Ambition – started out, which then went on to win funding from Big Issue Invest and Telefonica’s Wayra Acceleration programme. Similarly, we published a book too – Being ManKind. We currently have 4 projects in the works and we’ll be launching all of them this year.
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We Laugh
Having that Monday morning feeling on a Wednesday? No problem. Get in touch at [email protected] with the subject line “PLEASE MAKE ME LAUGH” and we’ll get a comedian to tell you a joke.
Super Being is consistently impressive and offers the perfect combination of reliability, creativity and innovation. They have designed and delivered a brand, a strategic digital overview, creative output and ultimately a huge community for Commonwealth Writers. They’ve alwyays been on hand, whether that’s working on the digital campaigns in London or flying out to countries like Bangladesh or Uganda at the last minute to help run and film a cultural programme. All of this has helped us to achieve our goals and continue to grow our community across the arts, from writing to poetry to film. It’s been like having a team who just get it and the programme is now fully embedded in 52 countries and growing every year.
Super Being Labs have supported Breast Cancer with their strategic vision for, and implementation of, our new digital support service; BECCA. They’ve also supported the embedding of an innovation process at Breast Cancer Care, running workshops and building minimal viable products for us to test. They enabled us to bridge the gap between having many research-based ideas, to just one concept that has demonstrated strong product/market fit and a viable business model. Darshan has also supported us with our overall ‘Digital Culture Programme’ by delivering an inspirational presentation to the organisation on innovation and app development which won a lot of hearts and minds and helped gain internal support for the innovation projects we were starting. SBL are a joy to work with. They are communicative, warm, highly proficient and creative. We work as a team rather than as a client, and Breast Cancer Care have greatly benefited from their presence, advice and unfaltering positivity.
Digital technology offers profound new ways to address pressing social and charitable challenges. But it is not just the code and the computation that offers this, but the problem-solving approaches of great digital design teams. Super Being is a great example of this: a team with diverse skill sets that works effectively with organisations large and small to address big challenges through design thinking and digital technology.
Super Being were essential in the success of our collaborative project looking at digitally enhancing a service run by NSPCC and aiming to equip parents from vulnerable backgrounds with the right tools in initial stages of parenthood. Super Being Labs were great at identifying the bottlenecks and suggesting innovative solutions – both in relation to the use of tech and to operations. They were really easy and flexible to work with, and were helpfully solution focused yet very attentive and sensitive to diverse needs and priorities of our partners.
- We’ve been working with Super Being for over 2 years and they’ve got the elusive ingredients that we were looking for – friendly, approachable, passionate, able to take on any challenge, creative in their thinking and at the same time able to implement impactful ideas. Their work on customer experience and user journeys means we have resources that help my colleagues can use directly with social entrepreneurs to help them make their social impact and growth sustainable.
Super Being have played a critical role in our reimagining of finance. They’ve listened to us, made sense of what we were trying to say and then driven it to reality with our brand, our message and our product. They’ve made it clear why our new way of thinking is not an alternative to the status quo but actually the way things should be to enable a mission driven world and a new economy that is being forged online. More than anything, they’ve helped us give tangible shape to our dreams, even when things were bleak. More than an agency, they’ve been our mentors, friends and team-members.
Super Being has been working in partnership with Breast Cancer Care since 2016 to deliver BECCA. A scalable service that supports women affected by breast cancer but also has the potential to support a wider audience of people living with long-term health conditions. The partnership with Super Being involves support on a technical level, building the BECCA app, but they also play a role in user research, service design, and delivering the overall vision for the product. The values of both organisations closely align and we hope this will be a long-term partnership which will see BECCA become the go-to companion for every woman affected by breast cancer.
It’s rare to work with a company that feels like a friend. My time with Super Being has been a consistent mutual conversation, tackling challenges as they arise and undertaking fresh responses and ideas to help my business grow. As a fellow comic and entrepreneur, Darshan has helped me out of some challenging situations and given invaluable insight, above and beyond the brief. My work is creative and comes from the heart so it’s wonderful to have a company that really understand this and has a social conscience. I hope we keep growing together!
Meet the Team
Everyone in the Super Being Labs team is a specialist in at least two different disciplines and also has entrepreneurial experience. This enables us to put together teams made up of diverse thinkers and doers for each brief – something that is crucial for creativity and innovation.
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Darshan Sanghrajka
Product Design / Systems Design / Brand Building / Problem Solving
powers:branding . communications . Design . digital strategy . Experience Design . film . humour . Product Development . product innovation . Project Management . Research . Young People
Darshan graduated with a MA in Economics and Modern History from the University of St Andrews (and almost embarked on a PhD in anti-terrorism in the USA but the entrepreneurial world was too much of a draw), and has over 10 years of experience working in start-ups, branding, innovation, communications and digital. His passion is using all those skills to tackle real social and industry challenges. This led him to create Super Being Labs and build a team around this vision.
Over his career, he’s created campaigns, digital products and strategies for Adidas, Sanyo, the Commonwealth Foundation, the National Trust, the Technology Strategy Board, Forum for the Future and many more.
Through Super Being Labs, he has also founded Being ManKind
Outside of work, Darshan is a Knowledge Equity Fellow at the Skoll Centre, University of Oxford, a non-exec at Sporting Memories (an org using sporting reminiscence to fight dementia and isolation for the elderly), as well as Chair for a small charity (STCA) in Kings Cross, and on the Ventures Advisory Board at UnLtd – the Foundation for social entrepreneurs -
Alex Thomas
Development / Product Management / Problem-solving / System Architecture
powers:Product Development . product innovation . systems administration . Systems Architecture and Design . Web Development
Alex and coding go together like gin and tonic. He has years of experience in programming, with a degree in computer science as well as a Masters in bioinformatics, where he specialised in big data and machine learning. He’s a full stack developer with experience in systems admin, specifically building scalable and secure web application architectures on the AWS platform. He also has deep experience in automated server provisioning and systems architecture design.
With his skills in PHP, Ruby on Rails and Java, he has built some cool digital products over the years.
Ultimately he believes in simplicity for the user, even if it means added complexity for the developer, and is a big fan of behaviour driven development, as testing always pays you back in spades down the road. On the front end, he believes in mobile first and considers a website to be complete only when there is nothing left to take away.
A fun fact – he also started a games website, which generated over £1m in revenue for partners like Amazon, Tesco, and Littlewoods. This process taught him how to run a business and also helped develop his SEO and PPC marketing skills.
When he’s not tapping out code, he enjoys coffee, craft beer, cooking, and most of all cycling – show him a hill and he’ll always want to suffer his way to the top. He’s also scuba dived all around the world and has amazingly curly hair.
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Dr Priya Dabasia
Research / Product Development / Problem-solving / Photography
powers:Capoeira . Drawing . Photography . Project Management . Research
Dr Priya Dabasia is in charge of our research methodology and protocols, especially for impact and health projects. She is also a producer and photographer for many of our impact projects.
Priya is actually a highly experienced optometrist, specialising in the field of glaucoma detection, and has been practising since 2004. Priya completed her pre-registration training at City University for which she was awarded the prestigious Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers’ Prize, and the George Wheatcroft Prize. In September 2005, Priya was appointed visiting tutor at City University, teaching on internal university lecture programmes at both postgraduate (MSc) and undergraduate level. Alongside her main role, Priya continued to develop her clinical experience with locum clinics, both at the university and in independent community practice. Priya writes CET accredited articles for journals The Optician and Optometry in Practice. In March 2013, Priya was awarded the Geoffrey Hall, Lightmongers Prize for services to City University. Priya also has a PhD for a project titled ‘A study of the role of advanced technologies in glaucoma case-finding’ and has recently finished a Postdoc and is now working with us to help us with our mission.
Outside her work as a researcher, optometrist and wildlife photographer, Priya enjoys playing Capoeira twice weekly and travelling around the world.
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Lucy Hannah
Arts Development / Programme Development / Writing
powers:
Lucy is driven by the transformative power of stories. She started her career as a newspaper journalist and went on to be a factual programmes producer for BBC TV and BBC World Service Radio. She moved on into drama, where she worked for Paines Plough theatre. In 1995, she returned to the BBC (Drama) where she co-founded BBC Writers Room, which is now the public face of the BBC to the UK writing community – online and in the real world. She went on to be writer-in-residence at HMP Rochester (Young Offenders) and to work with writers and dramatists in areas of conflict, including : Afghanistan, South Sudan, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. In 2011, she founded and led Commonwealth Writers (where she was a client of ours!). Responsive and proactive, it tackles the challenges faced by writers in the 53 countries of the Commonwealth. Since 2017 she has worked for a variety of national and international organisations, including : INTENT New Theatre, the British Council, BBC Media Action, Commonwealth Foundation and Okapi Consulting, to design, develop and deliver creative and cultural initiatives. She is on the board of: Papertrail Theatre, Vital Xposure Theatre and Oval House Theatre in the UK. Also, a board member of the Children’s Radio Foundation in South Africa and she is a director of the NGC BOCAS Lit Fest in Trinidad.
She is now with us, helping us grow Super Being Arts into a force that uses the arts for social good.
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Stuart Laws
Filmmaking / Storytelling / Comedy
powers:Directing . film . humour . Project Management . Screenwriting
Collaborating with Super Being Labs on film and storytelling projects with his production company Turtle Canyon, Stu is the man you need to speak to get some quality storytelling via film, animation or stage.
Stuart is a director, comic and writer, creating great new films and comedy with exciting new talent and established stars. He has worked with Robert Lindsay, Nick Helm, Julia Davis, Jessie Cave, Diana Weston, Jake Lloyd, James Acaster and Elizabeth Tan. He has spearheaded the online comedy channel for Turtle Canyon Media and racked up 700,000 hits for the regular stream of viral hits, sketches, web series and short films. The majority of the content is directed by Stuart and has been featured worldwide in publications such as The Huffington Post, The Poke, The Daily Mirror, Upworthy, The Daily Star and the British Comedy Guide. He is developing a range of TV shows with comedians and produced video content for Nick Helm’s upcoming BBC3 series.
Stuart’s latest short film “Chubby Bunny” has played at film festivals worldwide including The New York Comedy Film Festival and The London Short Film Festival, and has been shortlisted for awards in Seattle and at the prestigious Van D’Or awards. His most recent short “Over To You At 2” was nominated for Best Screenplay at the One Shot Movie Competition. Of course alongside all this, he has also worked on corporate films for 12 years, working all over the world and for some of the biggest international companies.
Not only is Stu blooming funny, he also has a very weird thing for Haribo and Panini football stickers.
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Stefan Moghina
Product design / UI / UX / product management
powers:communications . Design . digital strategy . Product Design . Product Development . product innovation . Product Management
When Stefan was a kid, he started making robots out of toothpicks and fishing cork. As he grew up he still wanted to create, so he taught himself the skills needed for his creations – starting off with graphic design, 3D modelling and basic animation, and then moving onto learning how to sew and even basic carpentry.
From here began his love of solving things creatively. He went on to study Marketing in Birmingham, and after working on a few start-ups, he learnt to stitch his creative skills with his product development skills. Welcome to the grown-up kid turned product manager – Stefan Moghina.
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Ed Corrie
Arts Development / Storytelling / Writing
powers:humour . Screenwriting . storytelling . Writing
As an actor and writer, Ed trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama where he perfected his fake Scottish accent and played Tig for 3 years. He has since worked with Anna Chancellor, Amanda Abbington and Jason Isaacs in projects including Shetland and Case Histories for BBC and has carved a successful niche playing either policemen or bad guys. As a writer, he just makes things up, but nobody seems to have noticed yet…
Before that, he studied English and Art History at St. Andrews University, so he prides himself on the fact that he has three degrees in waffling, colours and telling stories.
At Super Being, Ed is in charge of developing our use of the arts for social impact.
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Paul Andrei
Development / Problem Solving
powers:Design . Product Development . Web Development
Paul is a young technologist with an ambition to bring a change to the world status quo and improve the lives of people. Being around computers since a young age has sparked his interest for all things related to hardware and operating systems, on top of that, he is a programmer that did his first freelance gigs while still in high school.
Being very unconventional in regards to his education since a very young age, preferring to listen to history audio books than actually paying attention to his history teacher, he didn’t pursue a computer science degree but instead took the path of the autodidact.
When he isn’t glued to a computer screen, Paul spends his time listening to podcasts, his favorite being Hardcore History, trying to learn Swedish, and training his German Shepherds.
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Sigrid Iuhas
Product Design / UI / UX / Illustration / Animation
powers:animation . Design . Drawing . Graphic Design . Product Design . product innovation . storytelling . Web Design
Sigrid’s interest in visual arts began at a young age, so she started taking drawing lessons when she was 7 years old. After attending an Arts high school, feeling the need to explore the theoretical side, she went to study Art History. She then decided to focus on her practical skills and there began her journey with visual design, animation, 3D modeling, and product design. Now she’s at Super Being, using those skills to accelerate social good 🙂
In her free time, she enjoys traveling, drinking ridiculous amounts of coffee and collecting cats (yes, she loves cats).
Join the Mission
Are you someone who gets stuck in, putting the job title second and the collective mission first? Do you laugh way more than you worry? Are you ready for a challenge? Do you like people? Do you like mangoes? Are you able to question things? If you answered ‘yes’ to all of those questions, then we want to meet you.
We do things differently at Super Being Labs:
- You can take as many holiday days as you want – with power comes great responsibility – we trust in teamwork.
- You can either take all of August or December off, fully paid.
- You can work from anywhere in the world.
- Find a creative way of getting in touch with us to find out number 4.
Contact Us
If we can help or you would just like to talk about anything then drop us an email at:
Call us on +44 07738 00 48 20