Design Intervention: Prologue

A Story of One Workshop

This story is a prologue to a series of short articles about Design Intervention that was organised at F-Secure Corporation in October 2019, supported by brief reflection on my earlier design work and studies that were the inspiration to the event. The Design Intervention was an experiment to bring art school vibe to the corporate working environment.

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Two weeks before my first day at Estonia Academy of Arts, I went to a workshop led by two young German graphic designers. It was a sunny summer day. We gathered in the academy’s backyard, where a map of Tallinn was pinned to the wall of an old wooden house and a batch of darts hanging near by. Our task was to throw a dart and where it hit the map was the spot in Tallinn we had to visit, research and engage with our poster… This is how my journey as a graphic designer began.

Thirteen years later, after graduating from two art schools and doing some freelance, I finally found myself working in a more conventional corporate environment as a UX designer for B2B projects. Yes, design can be boring. But should it be?

Have you ever wondered how to bring excitement and boldness of art and design schools to the corporate environment? As we move from studies to jobs, creative workshops (the real ones) are replaced with office meetings, original ideas recede under the weight of daily routine and organisational limitations. We still have workshops with sticky notes and various testing and prototyping sessions, but those are just tools for creative work not the mindset itself. In other words keeping watercolours and brushes at home, doesn’t make you an artists.

Design is about creating new tools, using existing ones is called management.

Though to be completely honest, the corporate vs art environment is not that black and white. So called “excitement and boldness” of art schools can often ignore actual business needs or available resources, hence rendering itself fruitless. Therefore, when we discuss the idea of bringing art school vibe to corporate environment, we should clearly define what this vibe actually means. This is definitely neither an absolute creative freedom nor chasing an intrinsic value of aesthetics; but rather a joy from your work process, inspirational approach to problem solving, as well as daring to come up with original and innovative ideas. In other words it is a creative working culture and mindset.

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My dart landed near a temporarily closed tramway turning loop in decaying soviet-time industrial area. There was nothing spectacular about the place, it was partially deserted and only few people were passing by. Still, this area had a character — a green spot with railways surrounded by grim concrete buildings and a highway. Moreover, a football training hall from my childhood was just around the corner with a lot of pleasant memories. Plenty of topics to reflect on and bring to the poster. So would I think nowadays, but back then my mindset was quite narrow and straightforward.

The task was to create a poster that when placed in the location would emphasise its cultural significance, and that was exactly what I did. The tramway turning loop, when looked from above, reminded a quarter of a looped square (⌘) symbol, which in Nordic countries as well as Baltic states was used as a road sign to indicate locations of national interest. The idea was to combine a tram stop sign with the national heritage symbol on a single poster and then hung it on the spot as a tourist sign.

As straightforward solution to the task as it could possibly be. Still, the workshop itself with a draft-throwing exercise and exploratory nature of the assignment, that encouraged to look differently on a familiar place, helped to start opening my mind to unexpected ideas and ambiguous interpretations. It took me at least one more year of studies to embrace this creative approach to problem solving, that people now like to call design thinking. But this was already a different story of a different workshop.

As a result, the first question for Design Intervention to tackle was: How can we open up designers’ mindset to innovative ideas within the restraint of corporate environment?

Next chapter:
Design Intervention: Part 1 — About Systems Thinking