W/L/B June 2023
Happy June everyone!
We hope this edition of our newsletter finds everyone happy and healthy. After a delay that was as beautiful as it was welcome, Durham’s summer and its inferno-like temperatures have finally arrived to no one’s delight. And though his invention has undoubtedly caused a climate conundrum, we’d like to take a moment to give a shout out to Willis Carrier for inventing the modern air conditioning that is really the only way we could get through the heat and humidity here. We’ll be celebrating his invention as we hunker down in our home/office for the next several months.
And now, onto this month’s newsletter…
The professional activities that kept noodle’s team busy and engaged (and the lights on).
Anna is nearing completion of a French-language project to explore potential end-user and other stakeholder perspectives on a novel family planning product to inform product development, assess opportunities for market introduction, and identify challenges to uptake in Senegal.
We completed our engagement with an international development agency working in conflict areas throughout low- and middle-income countries around the world to design a multi-day, facilitated workshop focused on team-building and skills-sharing, which was held in Dakar, Senegal. Unfortunately, we were unable to attend in-person to lead the workshop facilitation due to safety concerns related to the regrettable unrest that gripped the capital city at the beginning of the month. Despite this lack of travel to the country, we are still happy with the work we did in designing a fun and effective workshop experience for representatives from country offices throughout Africa.
Kevin also facilitated a series of half-day virtual workshops for a client seeking to map out the pharmaceutical drug development process from initial idea to post-market introduction activities in order to map out existing activities, challenges, and costs, as well as to identify the potential innovation opportunities and stakeholders each step of the way.
We are both quite passionate about our work designing and facilitating workshops and ideation events, and love rolling up our sleeves to help individuals and organizations unpack challenges or noodle over possibilities, so reach out to us if you or your organization could use some ideation support.
We also kicked off a joint project this week with a new client to help helm a multi-phase investigation of their niche B2B customer base. The focus is helping them understand the journey that their existing and prospective customers take when deciding which vendor they utilize for their various business needs. This holistic investigation of customer journeys is incredibly exciting as it affords us the opportunity to demystify and elucidate a critical component of our client’s business needs and strategy, as well as to empathize with and problem-solve for customers in a new and fairly unique business context.
Internally, we have been spending a fair amount of time on some exciting projects and look forward to sharing the outputs of these noodle-centric projects in the coming months. One area we have been focused on recently, though, is in updating our existing, and developing new, marketing collateral in an effort to make our work and its value to our clients more accessible and transparent. We’re thrilled to share here our first marketing one-pager:
Lastly, we have had the pleasure of attending a number of illuminating webinars over the past month from some of our favorite people and organizations, and highly recommend everyone keep an eye on the following for future webinars as they will most assuredly be well worth your time:
We encourage you to think about how developing a holistic understanding of needs and challenges will help your organization grow and prosper, and to reach out to us to start a conversation about how we can help you develop this understanding.
领英推荐
The personal pursuits that helped inspire and rejuvenate us.
We celebrated our first wedding anniversary with our family in Sweden last month. It had been over a decade since Anna had been back and it was Kevin’s first time meeting Anna’s Swedish family, as well as his first trip to Sweden, so it was an incredible experience all around for both of us.
Upon returning back to Durham, NC, we were welcomed home by our beloved hummingbird friends that populate our yard each summer season. The delay in summer kicking off, and the mild weather that accompanied this delay, impacted the hummingbirds’ arrival time, and we were getting concerned that we wouldn’t see them this year. Thankfully, those concerns were premature, and assuaged by these tiny, incredible creatures.
We take a lot of inspiration from nature and are keenly interested in building in nature-centered design principles into our own practice, so any opportunity to observe and document our neighbors in the natural world is most welcome, particularly when it is right outside our window! This interest manifested on our bookshelves this month too, as we picked up and voraciously consumed Julia Watson’s brilliant, and beautiful, book “Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism”. Lo—TEK is a design movement that seeks to build upon indigenous philosophies and vernacular infrastructural approaches in order to generate sustainable, resilient, nature-based technology. It spans 18 unique countries and explores millennia-old human ingenuity on how to live in symbiosis with nature. Anyone interested in sustainability, design, or architecture will surely find it compelling!
The hybrid activities that piqued our interests and curiosities, while also helping to inform our practice.
As we have detailed in the past, we are both committed to and focused on constantly improving our physical, mental, and emotional health and well-being. And we have also shared how effective gamification is in keeping Kevin engaged with activities. The two of these realities collided this month as Kevin became increasingly addicted to the Asana Rebel app. Featuring a mix of yoga activities, meditation sessions, positive living tips, and healthy recipes, the app has helped both of us identify myriad opportunities to holistically improve our overall health. The byproducts of this have also been myriad: better sleep, more patience, improved sense of fulfillment, increased happiness, and more. It’s also inspired internal ideation about mobile app design and development, which will ultimately help inform different approaches to our practice as we seek to expand the value we add to our clients’ lives.
We really strive to remain ever-curious and to feed our fundamental inquisitiveness in as many different ways as possible. Through this we hope to embody one of our favorite quotes from GZA, a founding member of Hip-hop’s Wu Tang Clan: “Live a life full of humility, gratitude, intellectual curiosity, and never stop learning.” This knowledge-seeking manifests in different ways each month, though consistent forms come by way of books, articles, publications, podcasts, and documentaries. This month, though, we wanted to highlight some of the e-learning courses we have availed that have piqued our professional and personal interests:
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