CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

This week we learn from four new agencies who answer the question:

• What methods and approaches to you take to aid the idea generation and an in depth project outcome?

FELD

FELD believes that ideas change and that you must structure projects to allow for that change. Prototyping, design roughs, letting projects breathe — FAIL — and begin again is a reliable method for FELD. They believe that you may find that you need to change course after prototyping or iterating. To try and fail, repeat, then complete. Failure helps you learn. If you are stuck — work with your hands, continue to prototype and iterate. When you do fail, embrace it, learn from it, grow from it.

ACCEPT & PROCEED

Accept & Proceed deeply workshops their briefs in collaboration with clients — through games and tests — to get to the bottom or the one truth of the brief. To discover: “What’s the on thing?” They triangulate around the studio point of view, the client point of view, and most importantly the consumer point of view. They add moodboards, research experiments, visual and playful elements to each workshop. Once the workshops are completed they distill the collaborative-generated insights back to the client to ensure alignment.

STUDIO DUMBAR

Studio Dumbar’s strategy involves: strategic debriefs and research. They then brainstorm with the design team and interns. They go very wide and invite all ideas. They then provide two weeks for the ideas to be turned into rough concepts for the client review and align. Once aligned, they then go into final design phase and develop two final concepts.

EDENSPIEKERMANN

EdenSpiekermann sketches many ideas they can in a day or even an hour. The will also use writing before beginning design. Asking. “what is the idea,” and write it all down until it makes complete sense. Then they begin formal design. They also seek to go above and beyond the client’s expectations. They believe that it’s better to go bigger and farther as you can increase creative conception expansiveness once pitched, but you can always scale back. Further, they enlist multidisciplinary creatives to collaborate on concepts to ensure viability and that the concepts are makeable.

TEDX: DESIGN & DISCOVERY

The big takeaway for me from this 2003 production with David Carson is to trust your intuition, to lean on and embrace your unique experiences, your point of view, and your ideas to aid in expressing yourself as a creative (although this aspect will come with varying results depending on the project) and lastly, perhaps most importantly: Have fun. Experiment.

DESIGN INABA: MORAG MYERSCOUGH

I found Morag’s creative curiosity and playfulness contagious and imagine many who are lucky enough to collaborate with her at any level feel the same. The big takeaway from this piece was that we are the maker’s of our present and future: we can be whatever we want to be. Embracing the unknown can be liberating and exciting. Have fun. Make magic.

REFERENCE

Carson, D. (2003). Design and discovery. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/david_carson_design_and_discovery.

Myerscough, M. (2018) Design Inaba: Morag Myerscough on transforming spaces with colour and embracing the unknown. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://youtu.be/PgEX4Z9sH98

Falmouth University (2018). Concept Development | Interviews. Application and Interactions GDE740 19/20 Part-Time Study Block S1 (Falmouth, UK: Falmouth University)