Last month we were invited by ELISAVA Barcelona School of Design and Engineering to share our agency’s experience with the students of the MaDE – Master in Advanced Design Management, Strategy and Entrepreneurship, part of the Elisava Executive Masters program.
The objective of the Master in Advanced Design Management, Strategy and Entrepreneurship is to provide students with the knowledge, skills and tools for problem solving, and for being capable of designing and implementing innovative initiatives and leading change in complex environments. Based on this premise, our talk explored how we integrate disciplines and approaches at wonnd to create successful and impactful strategies for brands, companies and organizations.
These are some of the concepts we discussed:
- The impact of the type of approach we take to challenging problems on the outcome of our projects: the approach is part of the solution.
- Interactions and synergies of strategy and design in an integrated approach to problems, vs a non-integrated process.
- Integrating disciplines into a project, vs a traditional linear approach: How do we design a collaborative work process that includes the client’s knowledge and their culture? How do we apply different methodologies to get the best outcome from each project?
But in the end, to achieve a successful output from a project, we always have to:
- Focus on people and understand their needs (and what we mean by people is not only users and/or consumers, we mean all the people involved in some way in the success of a project),
- Understand the context in which the project is immersed, its challenges, constraints and opportunities,
- Work guided by the business goals of the project.
And, of course, it’s then a question of encouraging collaboration and integrating different disciplines to find the right solution. Only with this mixture, and by focusing on what really matters, is when/how we manage to create value. That’s what our motto “fighting against linear thinking culture and silos” is all about.
Thank you very much to Enric Bayó, Executive Masters and Postgraduates Coordinator, for the invitation to visit ELISAVA. It was a pleasure to be part of the students’ learning journey.
