Design: A design-led approach

08 May 2019

At Kwokka, we work with human complexity and collective creativity to expand the horizons of possibility, rather than taking a conventional narrow problem-solving focus that limits the scope of ideation. 

Kwokka works towards design-led solutions to the challenges faced by businesses, groups and organizations.  We do this through delivering actionable projects, proposals, ideas, prototypes, strategies and constructive maps that help shape services, systems, events, products and places. With extensive international and cross-cultural experience, we actively incorporate fluid design tools, sketching and concept modeling techniques to facilitate client engagement with the entire design process.  By designing with clients and stakeholders (including clients, customers, suppliers, staff and users) rather than for them, we ensure the development of ideas is: flexible, specific, appropriate and achievable.

Kwokka identifies and maps internal and external opportunties for modification in order to transform what and how you deliver services or products. We can help you transform what you do and how you do it, getting to grips with the details and project managing the process of implementation.  As designers we have experience in all stages of project work from research and concept design through to feasibility, development, realization and post-project maintenance/monitoring. Conventional operational or organizational thinking can be too stale, and blue sky thinking too unrealistic.  

Research: seeing design

22 March 2013

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. Marcel Proust

The innovation white papers of developed economies (notably of UK, USA and Australian origin) recognize an inability to compete with other countries on manufacturing and labour costs, and have turned their attention to creative or innovative industries, such as design, to help drive business and create value.  People are increasingly satisfying their aspirations through consumption yet not evidently reaching a position of wellbeing and contentment, the ideal lifestyle.  The complexity of the economic, social and political world we live in no doubt contributes to a feeling of disenchantment and disregard for the collective interests of society. 

When designers put pencil to paper (or the digital equivalent!), they may be shaping the lives of others with a single a gesture, a line to divide city boundaries, to subdivide a lot, to put up a wall, to insert a door, to add a shelf, to locate a wire.  Given the complexity of the way we live, the responsibilities and opportunities professional designers face are enormous.  Our current lifestyles are unsustainable and in order for the creative industries to play a role in delivering more sustainable alternatives, it is crucial to make some headway in understanding the complexity of the interplay between context and human behaviour contributing to lifestyle. 

Research: repositioning design

22 March 2013

The focus of design anthropology is on connecting the process of design to the meanings and functions designed artefacts have for people.  Design anthropology does not place separate emphasis on values, or design, or experience, which are the domains of philosophy, academic design research, and psychology, respectively.  Rather, design anthropology focuses on the interconnecting threads among all three, requiring hybrid practices.  Tunstall, 2008

Design anthropology challenges taken for granted assumptions about the way we live.  As an approach to analysis it is relatively new, and predominantly uses anthropological research methods in combination with the process of design and elements of psychological investigation.  Such data gathering and analysis may include; analytic approaches such as traditional ethnographic field studies/surveys, empirical observation, participant diary/self-documentation, interviews, case studies; and creative or ‘experimental’ approaches, such as sketching (concept + analysis diagrams), flow charts, mind mapping, brainstorming, focus groups, model making and photo-montage.  

 

Design: for + with transformation

06 March 2013

Everyone - regardless of cultural or educational background, work role or home situation - operates in an environment that is continually changing. We are all constantly adapting to the context within which we live and work, while simultaneously altering things around us to suit our needs, desires and preferences.

Within businesses, organisations, establishments and households, people everywhere are agents of change: building on the past, shaping the present and actively creating the future. Individuals and groups in any situation have the potential to be innovative and inventive, and yet are not always successful in overcoming the inertia to take action.