Discovery

ERIK KOCKUM: Extremely important. But I mean, we, I think observation for us, means sort of, being aware of what’s going on in the world and like following what’s a, the, yeah the world around you all the time and like, again, not, not being too in your closed world of design, like to connect everything. Like it’s a lot of times when we… often when we start again like the strategy phase and we start talking with the clients and so they’re so in their world that they haven’t like understood that no one would care about this, that they are thinking that like this will change the world.

And like, I’m like, yeah, but maybe from a different perspective it’s not that big of a deal or, you know. And, and yeah, just knowing what’s going on, it’s extremely important.

FREDDIE OST: And also the observation of your own brand on a situation where you’re today, because we have these three parts of, of branding where we see where are… Where is your brand today? Where do you want to be? And then where should you be? And those are three different things because what you’re today, that’s the easy part. What they wanted to be is something different than what they should be multiple times and they want to be something but then you also need to ask it. Can you, if you talk that talk, can you walk the walk? No. And then OK, but what should you be?

And that’s like a modification where you find like their true and that’s observation as well to be able to see your own brand in the future and in the wrong future and the right future and stuff like that.

KIRBY CLARK: Observation in design thinking is extremely important. It’s quite similar to drawing or art where really drawing is 90% observing what you’re trying to draw. So it’s very important to observe what’s happening within the space that you’re designing. Observe how people use things, observe how people feel, observe how people walk through something, observing really does help you design for the best possible solution.

During the discovery or observation phase, we would ask various questions depending on the project. So, for example, if we’re designing for a restaurant, we might be asking the clients a lot of questions as to how their business might operate. So how many people do they wanna seat in the restaurant? How does their kitchen work? Who’s working in their kitchen? How many people, what are they cooking? When are they going to be cooking? When is the place going to be open? Things like that. We would also, if we had the time available to us, sometimes we have a very short, actually design deadlines.

But if it’s possible, we really like to get out there and ask potential customers things like, what draws their attention to a certain place? What are they eating right now? What makes for a really good experience for them? It’s also just great to get out there and experience things yourself. So go on a little field trip, go to a restaurant and see what’s happening, see what’s out there. And use that as a form of research and obvious observation during discovery.

FREDDIE OST: Well for us, it’s like the process and the questions we ask is based around whether we see branding pretty simple, like a person, like a personality. So someone entering a party, what’s that person’s personality? That’s the brand platform, the values to everything, the personality. And then what does this person say and how does this person say it? That’s the tonality. And after that we translate those two, the personnel and the tonality into the visual identity, which is the looks and then the clothes. And if you start in the wrong end, if you start with shoes and the clothes and then they find out, oh, this is not the hip hopper then it could, it just becomes wrong.

And so that’s why it’s so important to, to ask a lot of questions in these phases and like, OK.

ERIK KOCKUM: It’s very interesting, like, and I guess also doing that, we start a lot with the why. Why do people do what they do? Or like, you know, they often, like in the beginning many people talk to us from the business perspective. They always like, we saw this gap in the market, or you know, we found something here that we believe in that could go big or whatever. But when you sort of break through that, there are often something else behind that’s much more interesting to, to, to use. Yeah.

FREDDIE OST: Yeah. I think we, we, we use Simon’s cynics, what’s our why model. Where the why can never, it’s not allowed to be money. And that’s when it gets interesting because then the founders or the owners or whatever have to like, oh, OK. Then have to start thinking. That’s when it gets interesting.