On a Wednesday evening at 111 Princess Avenue, you’ll hear the hallways of the 3rd floor chattering with laughter as the Railyard Internship Cohort revels at the sight of Intern Edwy throwing his pool stick around an amenity room with a certain lack of finesse. Love you Edwy.
We made a friend this summer. His name is “Bo Wong” – Ball King, more formally known as Dennis. The name suits him; Dennis is a king.
Over the past few weeks at Railyard lab, I’ve gone through insightful learning experiences in the design industry. Particularly, my perception on branding and graphic design. I began to internalize the fact that graphic design requires a lot of detail. Every element, font, letter, punctuation, comes into scrutiny by the designer. Using the programs is one element to design production, but to do it in a way that is proficient is another. I have come to realize that my perception of graphic design has much more depth to it than what I have thought.
Before, when I told people that I want to study architecture, they would respond by saying that “Oh you must be attentive to details or else the buildings you design will fall if, you miss out on the details.” I had that perception in mind, that designing architecture must require much more attentiveness and combines art and science (Than other design industries.) I naively deemed producing “graphics” to be simply “making things pretty”. Thus, when I started out designing posters and pamphlets on my own years back, I didn’t care too much about the production or the detail qualities of the posters so long as they “looked good”, people will be okay with it and would not sweat the details. Coming to Railyard and working through our first project, I felt even more strongly that previous perception was not valid at all. The best graphic/UX designs would have all of the concepts, aesthetics, and execution done extremely well.Read more
Two weeks ago, the Railyard team was lucky enough to sit in on a conflict session run by Vi and John from Transpectives. We discussed the role of feedback and conflict in a collaborative workplace as well as the operations of conflict in more personal facets of life.
At all times, we have a sense of ourselves. We have an image of who we are, what we look like, the characteristics we own, and our behaviour. Being that we are the pilots in the cockpit of our own consciousness, our sense of self is inherently the most valid and solid.
“Remarkable things can happen when empathy for others plays a key role in problem-solving. In today’s global marketplace, companies are being asked to design for increasingly diverse users, cultures, and environments” (Battarbee, Fulton Suri, and Gibbs Howard 1). IDEO.
Empathy: The capacity to place oneself in another’s frame of reference.
When solving problems and designing solutions, it is imperative to anticipate how products and services will work with different types of people. Evident in the quote above from IDEO’s essay Empathy on the Edge, you need to think about how different people will receive solutions. It is crucial to practice empathy; you must step outside of your ego and assume others.
“I put gloves on before I put gloves on, so I don’t get my gloves dirty.”
― Jarod Kintz, a.k.a Leah Pirani in a nutshell.
OCD tendencies? Yeah, I certainly have them. The need for structure, order and perfection ruled my entire life until I entered design school and learned to let go a bit (for the most part). Before, my perceptions around design led me to believe that its only purpose was to be functional and aesthetic. I quickly learned as an Industrial Design major that this is obviously not the case, especially when you are creating prototypes and developing multiple iterations of something and are not quite sure yet that you know what it is… You have to learn how to “trust the process” - a.k.a. ambiguity at its finest.
Oh hello there, my name is Dan. I was the user experience intern on the Railyard team, and you may find it peculiar that my post comes well after my time at Railyard has ended. I held off on writing a blog post mostly because I wanted to see what experiences and learnings from my time at Railyard would carry through to my experience in another environment (I’m currently a creative technologist at AKQA, a digital agency in San Francisco). Also I’m a bit of a chronic procrastinator.
What a great opportunity and pleasure it was to work with ACTS, on a lite rebrand! What is ACTS? Well I’ll tell you, it’s a well established charity that provides clean drinking water to rural Ugandans. Throughout their 22 years of active involvement, they have been able to provide water to 150,000 rural Ugandans. For those who aren’t familiar, you can check out their website at ACTS.ca. At the moment they are rebuilding their site to fit the new branding we just completed.
It all started with this: the construction of a new social housing building owned and operated by PHS Community Services Society and BC Housing that will be called “Alexander Street Community”. Dossier saw an opportunity to address the stigma surrounding the complex interaction between Railtown’s business community and Strathcona’s social housing and services community. The Railyard team in collaboration with Dossier proceeded to host several brainstorm sessions to come up with a project idea that raises awareness, transfers knowledge and is engaging.
In this post we will tell you about the internal and external strategies we recommended to Global Mothers - the meat of the project! Then we will go into our key learnings and takeaways from this project. Our core recommendations are based on our findings in the Acumen course and throughout our research (see our two previous posts to learn more about Acumen and our research).
There were two components to our research: analysis of social enterprises’ impact communications, and consumer insights.
We looked at a variety of different social enterprises in various sectors and collected social impact communications examples that were both visually appealing and informative, including: infographics, videos, statistics, stories, blog posts, and impact reports. We then used these examples in our consumer interviews to better understand what consumers like and do not like when learning about an organization’s social impact.
