I’m Leuty Parker
I design from experience.
I’m a designer, innovator and author with a background spanning fashion, product development and wearable technology.
My career and my recovery have taught me to look closely at how people move, adapt and experience the world around them. Today, I bring those perspectives together through my writing, creative work and the development of Smart Walking Technology.
My story
I’ve always been curious about the relationship between people, clothing and technology. I began my career in fashion, working across design and product development and gaining experience with names including Victoria Beckham, Hussein Chalayan, CuteCircuit and Li & Fung.
This work introduced me to the possibilities of wearable technology: not simply how something looks, but how thoughtful design can respond to the body, support movement and change the way someone experiences everyday life.
Then, a brain injury changed the course of my own life.
I had to learn differently
Recovery required me to relearn skills, understand my body in a new way and rebuild parts of my life that had once felt automatic. It brought movement, balance and independence out of the background and into the centre of my everyday experience.
It was difficult, unfamiliar and often frustrating. But it also gave me a perspective I could never have gained through my professional work alone.
I began to see design differently. I wasn’t only thinking as a designer looking at a problem from the outside. I was responding to something I had experienced for myself.
I’m bringing both sides of my life together
Today, I’m combining my experience in fashion, design and wearable technology with everything I have learned through injury and recovery.
I’m developing Smart Walking Technology to explore how footwear and intelligent technology might help people understand and improve the way they walk. I think of it as doing for walking what existing wearable technologies have begun to do for running and skiing: making useful information about movement accessible in everyday life.
Alongside this, I’m writing about my experiences, from my career in fashion and technology to the moment everything changed and the long, complicated process of finding my way forward.
Although these projects take different forms, they come from the same place: my desire to turn lived experience into something meaningful.
I’m designing what comes next
I don’t see recovery as a neat story with a beginning and an end. It continues to shape how I think, create and understand other people.
My work now sits at the intersection of design, movement, technology and lived experience. I’m interested in ideas that are ambitious but grounded, innovative but human, and capable of making a practical difference.
I’m still learning, questioning and developing. This website is where I’ll share that journey and the work emerging from it.