Fostering a Reflective Design Culture

Ask: As a design studio, we want to design Indy themed postcards, which would be used to help foster a reflective design culture and unify all design across the organization, under a defined set of principles.

Role: Researcher and Visual Designer

Responsibilities: Illustrations

Outcome: Created visual artifacts to inspire and nurture a reflective design culture within the UX Design team.

Approach: During the project debrief, we were told that these postcards would be used to help the design team prioritize design decisions. From the beginning, I recommended that we look at this project as we would any other design project: research, analysis, synthesis, early and often feedback from our client (the design team), prototyping and forming strategic partnerships along the way. 

Design works better in a crowd

We began by creating a spreadsheet and asking the entire design team to list some of their favorite places in Indy, especially those that they considered to be quintessential Indianapolis building, spaces, statues and installations. The goal of this was to give them an opportunity to set the baseline for the type of structures we should be looking at for this project. This proved to be an efficient approach because we received more than 50 recommendations.

Once we removed images that would not be ideal for the purposes of this project, we printed out each recommendation and wrote the four design principles on four separate pieces of paper. In a process similar to card sorting, we then talked to more than 20 people from all over the organization: engineers, data scientist, check-in personnel, and recruiters, asking each of them to select one image for each of the four written words based on which image best embodied each word. During these session, I documented everything so that we had clarity around how frequently certain words and images were paired. 

After tallying the results, we found that one of the images was paired with the word "consistency" often, but based on participate feedback, everyone saw something different in the image that communicated a sense of consistency. To get a different perspective, we asked a Sr. Designer to look at the image and help us determine whether we should throw it out or try to design the illustration so that the image conveys a more apparent sense of consistency. After talking through this problem and reviewing a set of similar postcard created by the design team based San Francisco, we decided to go a different direction and choose a different image.