Our interdisciplinary approach is grounded human-centred design and systems thinking.
Our approach
Our approach works best in contexts of high uncertainty where solutions aren’t immediately obvious.
Our stance is curious, generative, and iterative.
We balance empathy and rich stories with data and systemic analysis.
01
Understanding and re-framing the brief is a core practice for any good innovation work. In innovation projects, we almost never properly understand the problem we need to solve. Usually this is because the details of the challenge sit outside of our specific organisation or past experience.
02
A more traditional approach might break down a known problem into components and select among known options for solutions to drive efficiency. Generative approaches are useful when we have a poor understanding of the problem and we need to craft fundamentally new options.
03
When you’re trying something new, you’ll never get it right the first time. There are far too many unknown unknowns. The only way to discover them is to start a loop of acting, listening, and iterating until we can craft interventions that are effective.
04
In contrast to our default perspective, which tends to focus on the business or organisation, we zoom both in and out. When done well, this kind of approach complements quantitative data with ethnographic and qualitative data to build a rich picture of people and context.
Most problems worth tackling are 'wicked' problems full of complex, interrelated parts. Systems thinking is a holistic approach that helps us make sense of this complexity by teasing out relationships, feedback loops, and identifying points and mechanisms for influence to enable systems change.
As a practice, human-centred design and systems thinking are collections of mindsets, tools, and approaches that are constantly evolving in an ongoing, interdisciplinary conversation.
Human-centred design is a generative innovation process focused on solving the right problems in new ways by keeping people at the centre.
We are keenly aware that an anthropocentric, individualistic, consumer view of the world is precisely at the heart of many of the challenges we face as a society.
While we use ‘human-centred design’ as a convenient disciplinary label for the core of our design process, we try to be careful not to over-privilege the human or the individual perspective.
We like people, especially you.
Let's talk.
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