The CCI was a new department, with a design-led approach to solve complex city problems. CCI never shys away from any challenge and would never stand for “its always been done that way.” The current model for deriving public services is grounded in underlay assumptions. At the CCI, they are combing design thinking, research, data science and storytelling to understand and to solve complex societal problems.
Centre for Civic Innovation
Date
26 March 2020
My Role
Design Lead
Project Type
Brand Strategy, Print Design
A brand that's radical for the council's needs
The problem
The CCI had no presence online and needed a platform to embed the culture of design thinking into the council culture one step at a time. CCI needed to create a content hub that showcases projects and partners the CCI is working with; V&A Dundee and many more.
What I did
- Facilitated discover workshops to develop a vision of the CCI visual and communications style,
- Defined the vision of the website with the design team and senior officers, planed and prioritised aims with the approaching deadline.
- Sketched the wireframes, sitemap and blueprints of the interaction of the product.
- Built user flows that the UX of the website is based on,
- Created all graphics that are currently in use and still in use to this day,
- With an mobile first approach I set up a/b testing with low-high fidelity prototypes,
- Received feedback from users and iterated the designs, making evidence based design decisions,
- Designed and developed the visual brand – graphic system and branding guidelines for other designers to follow.
Research and insights
- Co-designed with 2 core members of the CCI to produce the vision and developing it to be visualised,
- Conducted interviews with council senior officers to seek insights in what the common barriers that occur regularly in projects at the council,
- Defining the CCI Design thinking methodology to share with senior officers to give concrete way to solve problems instead of the abstract,
- A place where clients find us online before events and to contact the CCI after workshops,
- Develop a new culture for working on projects, the common barriers can’t happen regularly on multiple projects,
- The CCI didn’t want their communications “to be like just an other council communications”,
- The website and assets had to be designed in a way that grabs attention and shows all the local neighbourhoods work that the CCI is doing to developed that design-led culture in the council staff and the citizens of Glasgow.
The impact
- The launch has created trust with partners and building lasting relationships with stakeholders commitment to the CCI mission,
- Clients reach out through the website and comms channels after workshops by 75% wanting to continue the conversation of next steps of developing design thinking into their ongoing projects,
- The CCI design thinking methodology is now deployed in multiple projects, from the awareness gained in the launch of the website,
- Other council departments are seeing the importance of the design approach by the backlog of the CCI project success articles on the website and also the failures.
Lessons learned
- Never fall in love with your own ideas,
- The problem that is raised is usually the symptom of the problem,
- Step back and ask why?
- Anyone can draw a diagram with lines connecting to a-z or 1-2, although what happens in-between is where the insights is… The errors usually occur in the transitions.
My Approach - Design-Led Problem Solving
Discover
Understanding the ask, building an knowledge library around what we already know.
Define
Doing research and identify opportunities.
Ideate and Test
Develop and design new ideas to solutions.
Develop and Deliver
Share the outcomes and results of the new outcome.