Culture Making in the Modern Day Studio

In the most reductive of descriptions, our studio primarily makes things.
We contextualize, and iterate, and prototype, and test. 

We design and create experiences through the making of these things.
The things themselves vary and cover a breadth of tangible products and experiences across technology, health & wellness, finance, commodity, and energy verticals. We design and build the things consumers use and interact with everyday - electronics, healthcare products, hardware, household goods, consumables - to name a few.
We deploy a host of design methodologies before, during, and following the making of these things - digging into our designer toolkits and aligning any number of way finding exercises throughout a project’s lifecycle to gain insights into users, create feedback loops, and work our way through design challenges we encounter as we create.

On any given project, a number of strategists, researchers, experience designers, visual designers, industrial designers, and production artists are likely to touch a program - either leading through their respective discipline phase or contributing to support an adjacent team. Working collaboratively across our multiple design disciplines, respective teams fill their input buckets, and then that thing we call “the process” takes over, and we arrive on the other side with thoughtful (and typically stunning) design solutions. 

As a Senior Project Manager at Enlisted, my seat plants firmly in the middle of any given project. I lead, co-lead, contribute, lean in, lean back, and manage projects from inception to completion. My main function is to create spaces in which designers and clients can thrive within - developing and maintaining said space through the ups, downs, starts, and stops of any given program. In a space where designers feel supported and clients feel heard, design stands its greatest chances at developing into truly meaningful, highly impactful outcomes. I’m privileged to get a front row seat into wayfinding, through each client’s unique problem solving objective. As a design studio, we are in a constant state of making. Like any solid maker studio, the floors are typically littered with early ideas that take their form in sketches on rolls of trace, foam core mockups, prototypes that didn't quite make the cut, samples and swatches of every possible shape and size. The mess is usually a pretty reliable indicator of where we find ourselves in the design workflow, as we work through early ideation and big picture thinking through more focused exploration and ultimately refinement.

At the end of the day, our studio creates.

“Yes, but what does your studio do? “

This was the question posed by Ali - a stranger to me up until 5 minutes previous during my first visit to a new coffee shop in the neighborhood. Ali later explained that he was encouraged to chat with me seeing how I was reading How to Talk to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. (Fantastic book by the way - but be forewarned that a stranger may in fact attempt to talk to you…)

“Well,. . .” I slowly responded as I collected my thoughts and searched for an answer that would satisfy this gentleman whom I sensed was looking for a richer answer than the one I previously provided to him. 

We create things - experiences, brands, products that help people. My pithy answer to a very simple question that threw me for a loop.

I think about it often. The exchange was quick - yet  memorable. It was a profound question - it could not have been more straightforward. However, arriving at the answer was more complex.  Ali was a wise old man. His question led me down a personal inquiry to come up with an answer that made sense during a time when what we do, or rather, how we do what we do seemed to be the inquiry that many of us would undertake as the pandemic unfolded/s around us. Like coming up for a breath of air after an assuming wave knocks you over, the hits can keep coming - social inequities, civil unrest, a divisive political climate - issues that challenge people’s ability to make it through the day - take your pick.

People grow weary.  A general sense of malaise can sets in - and yet life continues as we make sense of it all (individually and collectively) and find new ways of living in an ever-evolving and heightened state of flux. 

What is culture exactly? How is it made? We make things in the studio, we are making things - thing makers. Do these things make a culture? If so, how and what shall this culture be and aim to do?