Our story

Opiner started with a failure.

In October 2015, I was working as a service designer on a high-profile transformation programme. It involved huge teams, smart people, good intentions — and a lot of money. After months of effort, the project collapsed. The work was abandoned. Everyone moved on.

In all the project post-mortems, we talked endlessly about process: governance, delivery models and contracts. But no one talked about the people the project was meant to help. In this case, women facing cervical cancer. Their voices never came up — not once.

That failure stayed with me.

It's an uncomfortable truth, but too many projects fail — more often by falling short of their promise, and sometimes by failing outright. In most cases, I believe the reason is the same: we lose sight of why the work exists at all. The people affected by the work are reduced to “users” — or worse, “data points”. Their human reality fades into abstraction, and when things get hard, it becomes easier to disengage.

That realisation led me to experiment with storytelling, particularly through video. Not glossy marketing pieces, but simple recordings of people talking about their experiences, in their own words. Video changed conversations. It cut through assumptions. It helped teams pay attention.

But using video well turned out to be hard. Recruiting people takes trust. Recording raises privacy concerns. Processing and sharing footage is time-consuming. So despite its power, video often gets sidelined.

We created Opiner to remove that friction.

We've spent years refining a simple idea: make it easy to ask thoughtful questions, hear directly from the people who matter, and share those responses responsibly.

I'm convinced that if, back in 2015, we'd started each project update by listening to a woman — or a close family member — talk about their experience of cervical cancer, and the positive impact of early diagnosis and treatment, that project would have succeeded.

As a designer, I'm naturally biased towards seeing Opiner's uses in design work. But in practice, our clients use it far beyond design — in research, governance, policy, education, storytelling, and decision-making.

Its impact is limited only by who you involve, what you ask them, and how you use what they share.

If any of this resonates, I'm always happy to chat — about change-making, design, or anything else.

— Steve

London,
January 2026