Manifesto

DRĄSA is a Lithuanian word. It means bold and unapologetic courage.

We started this because the world needs a good story. We see it as design methods applied at scale, to people and products, by the best of the best. The world is faster, louder, and more confident in its half-truths than anything that came before. In that world, courage is no longer optional. It is the practice that has to be trained, deliberately, the way any other capacity is trained.

We run the research stakeholders remember years later, because it tells them something true about themselves and the people they serve. We design products and services that come from true insight and constant learning of craft and technology. We coach leaders to use their own specific strengths to get braver, in ways that compound.

When the tools are faster than ever — anyone can produce a screen in minutes — the only difference in who you work with is how they think: design is a discipline of thought. The companies that will matter in the next decade are the ones who actually understood who they were designing for. It requires looking at who you have been excluding and why, and designing for many.

We do this with top researchers, designers, developers, advisors, coaches and facilitators around the world. We practice courage in products and human systems.

If you recognise yourself in this, you are already part of it. If you want to work this way, drop us a line.

Aleksandra Melnikova

“Aleks is a force of nature” is the thing I hear most often from people I work with. There are eighteen years of design leadership behind that reputation: leading teams at Inviqa, Publicis Poke, Radley Yeldar, BIO and Foolproof, always working at the intersection of human behaviour and technology, and always looking for ways to bring something more inventive into the work, whether that’s a team ritual or the project itself.

My purpose is to make things that change how people see themselves. I do this by helping organisations, teams, and individuals make the invisible visible: the hidden needs, barriers, stories, behaviours, fears, possibilities, and systems shaping people’s lives. Once visible, I help turn that insight into better products, better services, better teams, and braver action.

I think of myself as the analyst and the artist working as one instrument. I’ve never had to choose between rigour and play, because for me the rigour is the play. Give me complexity to make beautiful, and you’ll get my best work.

In 2022 I co-founded Cosmic Velocity and grew it into a six-figure consultancy, leading every key client relationship myself. Along the way we shipped work for GWR, Merlin Entertainments, Pearson Education, HMRC, Avanti West Coast and more. That practice — its head and its heart — is now DRĄSA Studio. I’m trained in art and service design, hold an AoEC Practitioner Diploma in coaching, and completed executive education at Harvard Business School. I speak regularly at UX London, Leading Design, Interaction and Pulse UX, and lecture at universities across the UK.

Most people wait for perfect conditions before they start. I never had them, and that’s exactly why I understand what courage really looks like, and how to build it into the way people work.

DRĄSA means courage in Lithuanian. It’s both the name and the method: a design and coaching practice for people brave enough to experiment their way to better products, and to invest in the best asset any business will ever have — its people.