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A large part of our innovation process borrows from design methodologies, which are intuitive and iterative. Our experience of working with diverse clients has brought in sharper focus the universality of these processes. Described below are some tools that we employ depending on the context and the design challenge facing us:

• Being multi-disciplinary: Having multiple perspectives on a given problem helps uncover patterns and connections that would ordinarily get missed. It also gives us access to rich media tools to record and represent ideas & observations – through photography, video, illustrations, music

• Focus on user experiences: Being experience centric means to focus on the wholeness of context for users; to get a holistic sense of what products, services or brands means to users. User experience therefore becomes the barometer for business success and the lens through which we go about designing things, places or messages.

• Context immersion: Context immersion is the critical, initial step of any process – of experiencing the context from within it & in much the same way a user would. It helps establish a common minimum for everyone in the team and generates ideas that emerge from observations. Design research methodologies that help make sense of these observations are explained in this poster

• Systems thinking: Systems design makes one look at the interconnectedness of responses, stakeholders and interactions within any context. We usually term this as the “design visioning” exercise. In designing a new service or brand, it is important to establish the relationships that the user would have with all aspects of the service – often uncovering gaps & lapses that would ordinarily get discovered much later.

• “Designed” processes: The value of design lies as much in relevant processes as in the end product. We focus a lot on design as the means, yielding prototypes, strategies or vision for clients. These are ways of visualizing and giving intelligible form to concepts. These could then be given more tangible forms – of a logo, a website, a product, a retail interior – but they need to follow from a sound design process.

• Vibrant articulation: Design lends itself to vibrant articulation through a rich visual language of photography, video, illustrations and music. Actions, messages, contexts and behaviors, that are otherwise hard to describe, become more accessible and intelligible to other project stakeholders (such as the brand, advertising technology and product development teams). In doing so, it opens doors for a far more proactive and productive engagement with the research, explorations and design solutions.