workshopping it hard - design research for an austrian ministry

Starting my career as an art director in an ad agency in 2008 I was not so sure about why some studios and creatives felt the need to do workshops with their clients. it almost felt like an „bad word“ in some conversations and agencies. coming from a lot of projects, where the creatives just got handed an A4 sheet brief and started to create away from that without research or insights.

I have to admit theses days and almost 10 years later, focusing on identities and on how to tell the stories of brands in the best possible way, I now see the importance of sitting down, talking through things and to set tasks and goals together with the client. the better the goals and expectations are handled and discussed - the better the outcome. no designing based on hypothesis, no 10 feedback loops needed anymore.

coming back from my years abroad and the work experience in stockholm, hyper island and new york it became more and more natural to me to built and hold those strategic, positioning or design research workshops. often it is the beginning for a rebranding process to find out about my client's core values, needs and character. Other times it is for a ministry who wants to come up with a digital solution for teenagers and needs help with design research and insight about what is going in the world of digital, before actually going into the creation of it.

I found my partner in crime for those workshop in philip reitsperger who studied „innovation management“ in london after we both studied advertising and design. so since two years we have been offering strategic services under the name of IDENTITYLAB which ended up in a couple of projects a year so far. Last year we did the product positioning and communication strategy for watch brand Whatwatch and a handful of positioning workshops for smaller brands like 7tm. This year it is the strategic help for Route 28, and the ministry (which I will reveal once we are allowed to).

For me it makes the conception, the design process and the execution of visual branding way easier after a clear definition and a researched knowledge of insights. Sometime it just feels great to help people to connect the dots in those workshops. With branding and communications, I often believe that the rule of 80% of a good project being conception, thinking, talking, speaking, testing and only 20% is the actual design is true. We will see what projects will come next. Projects like these are always very hard to write about or show due to some NDAs but also because some of them don’t come with "catchy" images. So this time I will post a couple of „war-room“ pics before one of the workshops. Hopefully within the next months I will be able to walk you through a whole project from workshop to insights and execution.