This week I was very fortunate to be selected to take part in the Creative Leaders programme, organised by the Employability and Careers department at Ulster University. This programme involved spending four days in London meeting international design companies, networking and visiting cultural places of interest. It was a fantastic opportunity and one which I am extremely grateful for.
Of course, being Week 11 and with the module deadline coming ever closer I still needed to keep up the pace and finish off my banking app and start the design and development process for my bank brand’s landing page.
During the course of our four days in London we were scheduled to meet five employers: Frog Studios, Synechron, Jack Renwick, IDEO and Pentagram. This was a great opportunity to get into real studios and talk to designers working on international projects and get a feel for the businesses and what working for them would entail.
Our first visit was to Frog Studios, while I had never heard of them previously, it did not take long to see that we were at a company with a long history and many top-tier multi-national clients. A quick glance around the reception and meeting area showed previous clients like Porsche, Yamaha and Apple. So I was intrigued to find out more about the studio and their current work.
Frog studios was founded by Hartmut Esslinger in 1969, Hartmut had a particular interest in human centred design, and came up with his own mantra adapting the commonly used phrase of “form follows function” to “form follows emotion”. I believe this is a really intelligent way to think of product and digital design, after all we are designing for people and people feel emotions. I am interested to look more into Hartmut Esslinger’s design philosophies and this is something I intend to explore further over the upcoming break between first and second year.
As I this module has been all about creating a brand and one of the early tasks was giving my banking brand a name, I always find it interesting when an organisation has a story behind their name. In the case of Frog Studios it was inspired by Hartmut’s pet frog Friedolin, who is still the brand mascot, with a photograph like the one below in every frog office worldwide.
After a quick history of the brand, our hosts Zoe and Ron took us through some of the projects that Frog had worked on recently, these included work for Lego, David Lloyd Clubs and Home Hero.
One of the interesting points about the work was the process, from what Ron said the Frog process is to do some research and from that make a series of assumptions and then as quickly as possible create mock-ups and working prototypes to test these assumptions, then using the results of these experiments iterate to find the best solution. This is a bit different from some processes of design I have came across where all the research is done at the start of the project and any assumptions are actively discouraged. I like this more hands-on approach as designers we are still human and making assumptions is only natural for us, so instead of trying to fight this natural process Frog use it and use the data from testing the assumptions to direct the project. I think, particularly for me who actively enjoys creating mock-ups and prototypes that this approach of do some research, generate ideas, build a prototype or mock-up, test, iterate based on test data and continue could be a really good way of working, rather than getting to bogged down in research early in the project and losing some of those initial ideas.
Another thing that we discussed was how Frog thought about both inclusive and sustainable design. They had these cards that you could use as design prompts or to challenge stereotypes about people with different conditions called “Cards for Humanity” (not to be confused with the very different “Cards Against Humanity” game). I thought this was a brilliant idea to get designers to look at all the different types of people that may need to use something we design and how to take into account their needs as part of the design process.
