Inspiring the next generation of creatives. Design thinking and its impact on businesses.

Creative thinking can have a huge impact on business and in a climate where businesses must innovate or die, this is more true than ever. Aspiring creatives leave university or college with a basic set of tools, but what they do with them and the impact they can have are really wide open. Den went to the University of the Arts London (UAL) Creative Futures week to inspire the next generation to think about design thinking and the impact it can have on business. 

Our growing team of designers and developers have between them an amazing breadth of skills and experience. One thing they have in common is that they never imagined the impact they could have on the business world, by applying the kind of thinking they have learnt in their education and work lives to date, to business problems. 

Den regularly undertake transformational brand and web projects for our clients but since teaming up with Elixirr, we also take part in the design thinking process that Elixirr, the challenger consultancy, have made their own. 

We headed over to UAL at Elephant & Castle to tell the story of this kind of work. 

The team

I acted largely as a kind of master of ceremonies, with the real content coming from Cat, an Elixirr Consultant, Vanessa, one of Den’s Creative Designers (and incidentally my inspiration for putting us forward for the talk) and Rob, Den’s Creative Director, there to answer questions about career success in the creative industries. 

We took the assembled students through our process:

Defining the challenge

At the start we help our clients to define their challenge (a problem they want to solve). Then we aim to expand their thinking by showing them cross-industry content about innovation and how consumer’s expectations are being raised by other industries to the point where they are no longer happy for signing up to a bank account (for example) to be a lengthy, paper based, in-person process. 

Workshopping the solution

With minds expanded, our team take the clients through a process of refining a solution. The idea is not just to improve their current offering but to move into a space they might not have imagined before they defined the problem, but to really aim high for their consumers. The outcome of that workshop process is often some very low fidelity wireframes of a potential application, dashboard or similar that is going to do more than just solve their problem. 

Design development

At this point the design input really ramps up. We go through a process of rapid prototyping and user testing until the design is ready for the team to build the MVP (minimum viable product). Sometimes we can take advantage of time zone differences and clients will go for dinner leaving hand drawn app screens on the wall and wake up in the morning to a working clickable prototype. We move from low fidelity prototypes to high fidelity designs making sure that the UX is slick and the look and feel is inline with the brand and enhances the user experience. 

Building the product

We then talked through translating the designs into the final product through the build phase of a project. As our developers are part of the Den team, they work closely with our designers and the consultants to make sure development is not only fast but accurate. We can sometimes go from defining a problem to launching a new application live in the space of four months. 

Vanessa inspired me to suggest Den take part in Creative Futures because she said to me that she loved the work she was doing. At the time she was working to solve extremely complex user experience issues on a trading platform. She added that never in a million years would she have imagined that this is what she would be doing a few years on from leaving her design training at UAL. It feels really good to be making such an impact with the tools she left university with and adds to every day. 

We had a great audience who asked lots of questions about how their skillset might fit in to the journey we had discussed, as well as seeking more general career advice. It felt important for Den to be part of this Creative Futures event. If we don’t reach out and tell our story then we only meet the creatives who have already made the leap to see their value in the business world, and we aren’t necessarily meeting the very best thinkers from the creative talent pool. We always look forward to welcoming new creative and technical talent to our team!