Hi, We’re Fieldwork and We…
A couple of years ago my business partner, Loz, our project manager, Pauline, and I sat in a conference room at Friends of the Earth, having just finished our pitch for a project to rebrand the organisation and overhaul their website. We’re definitely not the best presenters in the world, but we had some good ideas and a way of working that connected with and excited the people in the room. And then someone asked, “What do you do?”
It sounds like such a simple question, yet we’ve never been able to answer it with any clarity or conviction. Even my mum tells me she’s not really sure what we do, and I’ve genuinely tried to explain on several occasions. I could chalk that up to the generational thing (mums never understand this stuff, right?), but it’s not — I’m just really bad at talking about what we do at Fieldwork.
We’ve wrestled with this since the very beginning. I remember sitting in uncomfortable £19 plastic IKEA chairs, in a big empty room when we moved into our first studio space, having endless conversations about what we should write on our website. Two or three years later we revisited and came up with some vague statements that were basically useless.
A year or so after that, we really focussed on getting it right because we were going to do a new business push. We were going to start being confident about how great we are (we’re naturally understated northerners), clear about what we can offer, and step things up a notch! We had a day with a new business consultant, spent another couple of days working it all up, and then boiled it down to:
“We’re a design and technology studio.”
Suffice to say my mum still had no idea what I do for a living.
I don’t know how these conversations go at other studios, but we’re not the only one with this problem. If you browse the websites of a random selection of design studios and agencies you’ll find a lot of generic and, for all intents and purposes, meaningless copy. For us it goes something like this…
“We make digital tools, don’t we? Stuff that people use to create, or track, or measure, or something?”
“We do, yeah, but if we say that specifically will clients stop coming to us with their fun print projects?”
“Hmmm, maybe. Ok… We’re a design and technology studio?”
“Boom.”
Like most design studios, what we actually do is a big, amorphous collection of techniques, processes, skills, ways of thinking, and networks of collaborators, all of which we pull together ad-hoc for each project. It’s a lot of stuff that we’ve spent years of our lives learning and collecting, and I think that baggage makes it difficult to talk about — we want you to know how much stuff there is, but we can’t tell you because there’s so much of it and some of it only makes sense when you understand all of it.
In our case, we’re afraid that by being specific we’ll only talk about small parts of what we do and not communicate our real value. This thinking has always resulted in generic, meaningless descriptions. Not much use to anyone, least of all the people who might want to work with us.
Earlier this year we threw the towel in and stripped our website back to an image-led collection of projects. It’s not ideal but it gives us a kind of blank canvas from which we can build better ways to let people know what we do and how we do it.
This shift in thinking gives us some clear guidelines:
- Don’t waste time on generic, umbrella language. We’ll sometimes need to use generic language, but it’s not very effective and nobody really takes anything from it, so pick something and move on: “We’re a design & technology studio.”
- Favour concrete examples of what we do. Instead of “we make digital products,” we’ll say, “We make a story telling web application for kids, a journey tracking tool for active travellers, etc.”
- Where we find ourselves using broad terms like, “digital products,” stop and think about who we’re talking to, or writing for, and try to break it down into specifics that work in context.
So, what do we do at Fieldwork?
If you’re at the beginning of your startup or project, we help you turn a fuzzy and confusing collection of ideas, todo lists and endless possibilities into concrete next steps. We help you figure out which of the bazzilion questions keeping you awake at night are the handful of important ones that you should focus on first.
If you’re starting to communicate your project with the world, we tie everything together visually for you, so that it looks like a thing and not a scattered collection of things. We give your project a visual identity.
If you’re building an online tool, service or product, we design your user interfaces and write code. We create quick initial prototypes as a low-risk way to test your biggest assumptions and learn from test users. We manage the migration from those prototypes into a robust codebase upon which you can continue to iterate.
If you own or manage an existing product or service, we give you ways to find new directions and opportunities, and to assess which of those opportunities to pursue first.
We’re about to start trying this out, so right now this is just a theory, but my hunch is that if we ditch the anxiety about communicating everything we do, and focus on the well defined areas of our expertise, we’ll attract the kind of projects that we’re best at and connect with new clients.
I’ll update when I’ve run this by my mum.
I’m not online much, but you can follow me here on Medium where I’ll be writing semi-regularly from now on — probably a mix of lessons learned from running a small design and technology studio, and some more technical stuff. You can follow Fieldwork on Medium, Instagram or Twitter and find some of our work here.
