Double Diamond: Belfast Design Week
Belfast Design Week is an annual design festival in Belfast, Northern Ireland founded by Christine James, Karishma Kusurkar and Catherine McGinnis. We set up Design Week in 2015 and have always intended for it to showcase the breadth of the design sector and to celebrate design and all of its outputs. Our method of discerning what falls into the category of design rather than art has been looking at the process by which a project has been created or by which a person has worked and most importantly, the intent of the work. We have used the Design Council’s definition of design as one of our key references when deciding what to include in events and in our projects.
Although Design is defined to be for a user and to have a specific intent or purpose, it is only in recent years that this has been made more blatant by designers. Within the design sector in Northern Ireland, we have found an increasing number of designers and agencies embracing user centred design and service design — two areas that are centred around purposeful creation. The user centred and service designers we engage with come from different backgrounds and work with different clients but the methodology many have in common is the “double diamond.” What lies in the appeal of the double diamond process of design is its simplicity and ease of being understood — not just to designers, but to anyone engaging with the design process. It also emphasises that the design process should be iterative even as ideas develop.
You could — in fact — say that the double diamond is an example of good design.
Big Motive had the pleasure of working with The Bytes Project and Epic CIC on the design of a new platform they will be launching late 2019.
Voices for Impact is a social listening platform that will allow young people to share their experiences and challenges in society. The platform will allow them to start making a real impact on youth services in the UK.
We worked with Bytes through the 5-day Sprint process to design and test the interface that young people will use to allow them to read, support and share stories.
