work

What can you do when the current economic climate forces you to rethink your current business model and behavior? 

A novel option worth considering is to bring in a team of designers to facilitate a quantitative and qualitative introspective collaboration with your company. Collaboration is key to this process. It helps promote staff investment in design suggestions and ideas, since they directly helped create them.

We have tested this method of collaborative design with a metal fabrication company based in North Philadelphia. As always, our process began with interviewing staff members about their life at work. In this case, the resulting research was heavily biased towards issues with group communication, so we knew that this was a “sweet spot” for our design input.

By bringing an understanding of psychology, group dynamics and cognitive science to the table, we worked with the staff to co-design tools to help them manage their anxiety about interacting together. Collectively, these tools begin to change the behavior of the individuals allowing the business to eventually grow and evolve.

“This was my first experience in designing with people. The sense of excitement and investment is something I love about co-design”.