Believe in Something
The north star guiding how we work — and what it means when we say “Mission Accomplished.”
The North Star Guiding How We Work
Every business has the ability to create powerful solutions and positive impacts at the intersection of its shareholders, its stakeholders and employees, its customers, and its community — but must be brave enough to design it that way.
Four Core Design Truths
We've consulted across the country, a wide range of industry verticals, and vastly different communities to demonstrate that design thinking and co-creation are the keys to creating truly innovative solutions — the kind that enable our clients to operate purposefully and enjoy intentional outcomes.
Four core design truths collectively serve as our north star:
What It Means In Practice
Design is the HOW, not just the WHAT. The word describes a framework for facilitating a flexible, iterative process with multiple means to infinite ends.
This recursive process is part and parcel to how any designer works, regardless of title or purpose. How we work is the very core of everything we produce.
Design deliverables, while often aesthetically pleasing, are not “outcomes” in and of themselves. Creating an outcome necessarily involves an audience, and is a product of purposeful practice whereby we devise and implement strategies to intentionally meet the needs of that audience.
We validate and iterate along the way to ensure success. Prioritizing observation, reflection, and nimbly incorporating the needs of real people on an ongoing basis is one indication of a mature design practice.
Design is a mechanism for incremental improvement and empowerment. It enables us to bring about understanding, implement order, and intentionally trigger positive outcomes.
Designers are helping to solve some of the toughest challenges facing modern communities and business. A core principle of universal design is to create products and services for the broadest set, not a subset, of our audience. That principle is also a strategic advantage when it comes to operating efficiently and effectively.
Universal design values accessibility, structure, and hierarchy over aesthetics, and there is always an aesthetic solution to an accessible end. Designers therefore strive to exercise discernment in determining the appropriate time and place to experiment with functionality or create disruptive experiences.
Design helps us all function in real life, but for some, design makes a better life possible. Everyone deserves an accessible experience.
Serving people with a range of abilities must become a default aspect of design practice, purposefully creating products and services to be utilized by the broadest set, not a subset, of any given audience.
Ensuring that universal design is the very backbone underlying the experiences and products we create is good for society as a whole, and simply the right thing to do. To that end, we know that utilities are not the place to experiment. They're where we implement tried and true usability principles and established interaction paradigms. We practice discernment when determining the right time or place to disrupt or experiment with functionality.
Design doesn't live on an artboard. It impacts real lives in tangible ways. To live in a future shaped by good design, designers must work to democratize design.
We must eliminate elitist attitudes and exclusionary practices that have plagued the discipline, and embrace the responsibility to evangelize and educate others about its purpose and power, and about how to practice and apply it.
In doing so, we empower our colleagues and community to adopt and experience the benefits of design practice. In turn, we legitimize its value and reinforce its staying power.