The Contemporary Insight Project: Three Departments

We organise our insight projects by allocating resource to the following three ‘departments’:

The Department of Style, Brand and Design

Breathing spirit into the project; creating mood boards; researching and designing visuals; mapping the concepts via infographics; and making the whole thing stand out from the crowd.

Key roles:

• Mood maker: designing the atmosphere, vibrations and feeling of the project. This is about creating an aesthetic that emanates from every touchpoint of the project
• Identifier: working closely with the mood maker, the identifiers create more specific assets such as logos, fonts, websites
• Cartographer: ensuring that people can navigate around the increasingly complex terrain of contemporary insight, the cartographers make event maps, infographics, and other navigational tools

The Department of Insight, Ideology and Storytelling

Keeping on top of the zeitgeist; interviewing cool people; synthesising ideas; crafting manifestos and generally making things happen.

Key roles:

• Dot-connector: these are the organised people who get things done, focus on the small victories, and build the momentum
• Narratologist: a project story needs good plots, characters and world building so that complex topics can be understood and explored
• Content Creator: from filling up Instagram pages, writing articles, filming the action, these to they capture the event through multiple mediums
• Ethnographers: these are the illuminators who shine light on the project by deploying advanced research tools and methods

The Department of Platforms, Experience and Play

The home of platforms ninjas, social media gurus, hackers, coders, gamers, and the builders of new worlds

Key roles:

• Ludologist: masters of gamification mechanics, these players look for areas to build interactivity, flow and fun into a project
• Platform ninja: these are masters of switching between the countless number of platforms out there, advising on the affordances of the latest social networking tools
• Benchmarker: keeping tabs on what’s happening out there and learning from how other people are capturing, analysing and communicating insight
• Socialiser: these are the social butterflies who weave Instagram, Tik-Tok and whatever else together so that people can connect in whatever way they like