Services
We’re flexible in how we work, whether you need regular ongoing advice, one-off project support or facilitated workshops for groups.
Every organisation is different, but there are common starting points: either an immediate problem to solve, or a future opportunity to explore. So we have two connected approaches:
Our approaches
Design Serving Life
Our critical thinking work opens the bigger questions about how design can create the change needed for a sustainable future.
Making Design Work
Our strategic creativity work focuses in on how design can be managed to meet your current ambitions, plans and budgets.
Who we work with
Businesses
We mostly work with small/medium businesses or start-ups - the organisations that don’t have the vast budgets or in-house design expertise that large global companies do. We bring affordable strategic guidance, getting you on track with design thinking, structured process and action plans.
Designers
We help design agencies with internal management where teams mix young talent, senior creatives and clients with changing expectations. We also help design agencies with new business, especially with clients that have environmental or social purpose at their core.
Universities
Workshops for students considering their future career and life choices before they enter a highly rewarding, but also highly competitive and commercial, design industry.
Facilitating change
Design is never neutral, never passive. Design always creates change - it always has environmental impacts, effects people and redirects money.
To be agents of positive change we must all make room for different perspectives and be prepared to change our own perspective. We need to question what and why we are designing.
Our critical thinking work facilitates a wider conversation about the direction of any proposition before the design process begins. By exploring and navigating these wider questions, we ensure that designers and organisations are better prepared to engage with the systemic level of change and innovation that is needed to create sustainable futures.
Together we will:
// Connect your vision with global challenges and changing agendas
// Clarify material impacts
// Acknowledge ethical dilemmas and commercial pressures
// Explore co-design potential with new users
Design Dilemmas workshops
Design is creative, but most design projects have a commercial aim. To work effectively, designers must manage changing expectations on local and global levels. Do you know the type of impact you want to make, or what you might be missing? When might you make a case for a different direction? These issues arise for design teams and their clients, and it’s important to step back and discuss them. Our design dilemmas workshops create space to explore the more philosophical side of what and why we design.
Investing wisely
As a carrier of messages and a tool of influence, design is one of the best investments a business can make. It significantly impacts on what people notice, what they understand and the actions they take.
Through the creation of products, services or brand propositions, businesses use design to persuade, inform, and influence behaviour.
Our strategic creativity work ensures business owners, senior teams and entrepreneurs invest wisely in making design work effectively. We help them master the professional practice of design management that aligns design implementation with business goals to achieve competitiveness.
Together we will:
// Clarify your strategic priorities
// Boost creativity levels
// Define end-user perspectives
// Generate effective design briefs
// Commission the right designers
Design
Management workshops
To use design effectively, you don’t need to learn how to design (let the designers do that). Instead, organisations need to know how to manage design well - addressing the right issues and applying the right types and levels of design. Our design management training sessions provide a foundation of skills and knowledge, allowing participants to identify their strategic design goals and create an action plan to support their organisation.
Sessions can be delivered in-person or online with case study examples and the demonstration and practice of tools.
