Experience design

Whether it is a multi-channel soundscape evoking the experience of nature, a media installation visualising the energy usage data in a high-performance building, or a mobile app that helps you seamlessly navigate a complex transport hub, our teams have the expertise to deliver. We craft multi-sensory experiences with sound, light, technology, interactive media, physical environment, all the way down to the supporting infrastructure. 

Since the pandemic ended, the way we use and interact with spaces has changed. From community-led placemaking to the blurring of home and office, end users are expecting new options that are intuitive and invigorating. We help clients to reimagine, prototype and implement new potentials for spaces.

Individual actions are key to meeting sustainability goals. That means designing spaces experiences and strategies that encourage better choices and behaviours. Experience design is a way to shape new habits and narratives that help organizations meet those goals.

Developing a vision for downtown Providence – our experience design team joined forces with our urban planning experts to develop the concept for a unique placemaking and public activation concept for the downtown district in Providence, Rhode Island (US). We developed a set of personae representing a range of constituents – from downtown workers and commuters to young families and youth to people experiencing homelessness – and mapped their current and future state journeys through the site to drive the design process.

Our team use effective engagement methods and tools to inform requirements and outcomes. This inclusive process helps reduce the risk of building the wrong thing. 

Once we understand the problem, we design strategies and an overall vision for future users that spans services, spaces and digital realms. This ensures that all touchpoints sync with users’ needs, while aligning to your brand values and mission. 

We help organisations to navigate the complexity of technological innovations, with social and cultural transformation; bringing them closer to the people they serve. Increasingly, design methods have been used to work through pressing ESG (environmental, social, and governance) challenges. We help clients to address these issues with user research, engagement workshops, and developing tools to turn abstract considerations into real world actions. By placing people and planet- principles at the core of our practice, we reframe problems around human and planetary needs, delivering robust concepts which nurture long-term value for all. 

Our holistic design approach is rooted in collaboration, innovation, and empathy. We form strong partnerships with clients and stakeholders, embracing creativity and technology to foster positive change in both people’s lives and the environment. Centring our practice around people and planet, we go beyond current consultancy practices, empowering communities to shape their own environments and helping clients exceed their aspirations. 

Our systemic mindset uncovers underlying issues and challenges assumptions, bringing together new perspectives and inspiring a regenerative future. Through the double diamond design process, we delve into the wider context before crafting impactful interventions. Zooming in and out allows us to grasp the intricate connections within a broader system. 

We begin by defining project goals and establishing an evidence-based appreciation of user, customer or community needs and preferences. We understand the integration with organisational priorities; and establish a shared understanding with stakeholders. From here we learn more about the people we’re designing for, explore solutions and refine concepts. Throughout, we constantly switch our focus between the impact on people and considerations of wider social, environmental and economic trends. Experience design can be applied to individual services, buildings, districts or cities and we always strive to bring in the most diverse range of voices into the conversation.

Once we have refined our idea, we have the depth of technical acumen and project experience to fully design, implement and commission our experience design concepts. We continue to play a role during operations, tuning and refining the experience once it is alive and in the world.

Given the way both society and economy are continually reshaped by emerging technologies and innovative digital tools, our experience design practice integrates the digital and physical worlds, with a clear focus on solving human problems and delivering critical business, social and environmental outcomes. Experience design ensures success today and relevance tomorrow.

We do this through facilitation to help clients develop shared values and visions, new infrastructure, new digital products and service propositions as well as actionable outputs like frameworks and investment plans. All are grounded in deep contextual research of physical, digital and organisational environments, so that we can help clients maximise the value of built environment assets beyond purely technical efficiency.

Our methods in research, visual design, facilitation and storytelling enable us to understand and utilise the opportunities that facilitate organisational change. We help to develop solutions that confront the challenges we’re collectively facing to inform the operation, maintenance and adaptation our build environments and people's interactions with them. 

A core principle of our strategic design work is participatory design and co-creation with communities.  Often barriers to functional change are organisational. Widening who gets to inform decision making - from physical design decisions to those that lead to the development of new governance structures means new forms of ownership and management can be created, that better serve organisational needs as well as the needs of the people that use them. Strategic design allows for the formation of clear stories about the value of potential solutions, which helps clients establish new futures. 

By defining these stories, exploring their uses under different scenarios, and developing assumptions we can test to adapt, products, services and pathways in a way that achieves desired outcomes. In doing this, it’s likely solutions will be developed that are more likely to be used and maintained. 

We do all of this through creativity and conversation, nurturing relationships and tensions between people’s needs and planetary boundaries. Our practice in innovation management helps to create the necessary structure for partnerships to flourish, and to facilitate the development of innovative products, services and systems to enable organisational change.