21 years of… what?

Well our little company is all grown up and come of age. 21 years is a long time, and it’s been a journey of ups, downs and rounds and rounds, as I’m sure anyone who runs their own business would testify to. We’ve never been particularly good at marking the milestones, well until recently we weren’t, but it’s something that we’re trying to get better at, and 21 feels like it’s worth taking a moment.

If this was our child they’d now be of legal age to get into all sorts of trouble in all manner of places and situations. While 21 in human terms is often celebrated as a rights of passage, a last hurrah as the person crosses the last line of childhood into the expanse of adult. So maybe we’ll indulge in a little wild abandon, but I think more importantly it’s an opportunity to reflect on what we’ve been doing for the last 21 years, what it all means, and what the next 21 years might look like.

Over the years we’ve seen a lot of change. What we were designing changed from logos, business cards and annual reports, to brands, websites and experiences, and has expanded with our strategic design arm wove to business models, innovative services and projects that drive change. Trends have come, gone, and come again. Tools have grown slicker, more sophisticated and powerful, with the promise of simplifying our lives, but almost always making them more complicated. We’ve seen waves of new big things that were rumoured to change everything — flash, designers having to code, the metaverse, and now AI — that have came and went without really changing that much.

But what about us? Why did we start this? What kept us going? It’s only on reflection we can truly start to understand it I think. The decisions we’ve made, the approaches we’ve developed, the paths we’ve avoided and the ones we’ve taken, the shifts we’ve made, the people we’ve shared the journey with, what they’ve brought, what we’ve given, what we all stood for together.

In 2018 we started reflecting on some of these as part of a strategic review, turning our processes, painfully, on ourselves. What became clear was that we had always made most sense and most impact working with people ambitious for change, and at key points of change. With people launching new things because they wanted to change the way things worked, or change the way they worked. With organisations embarking on new chapters, evolving how they worked, or making brave shifts. We were those people 21 years ago, ambitious and excited for new ways of doing things, for the positive shifts that design could help usher in.

It feels like change is central to who we are and what we do. If we were going on mastermind it’d be our specialist subject. While others run from it we run towards it. At least I think that’s why we’re here and what we’ve been working on for all these years.

Taking that process further, reflecting on our journey and trying to make sense of 21 years of projects we’ve worked on, people we’ve worked with and decisions we’ve made, the picture that starts to come through is of a group of people, working in different ways, as a partner to those making positive change a reality. And looking forward to the next 21 (🤞), I think i’d be quite happy if it looked like this too.

21 years of working in different ways, as a partner to those making positive change a reality.

Inspiring Positive Change
Asking — how do we engage with people in new ways to change the way they understand and think about things? Like our work with Dublin Fringe Festival, on the ID15 travelling design exhibition, or Shape, a film that explains the complex world of design to children in a way that speaks to their imagination (and doesn’t use words!)

Prototyping Positive Change
Testing — projects and approaches for us as a business, and ways of working with clients that create space to explore, experiment and learn from them. Helping to explore new ways to generate donations for Unicef with our project Grow, or publishing (not a) newspaper of speculative stories from a future Dublin to better understand where we are now.

Incubating Positive Change
Cultivating — new ideas, new approaches, new initiatives, that act as catalysts and change the way things work. Co-founding the design community platform 100archive with friends and colleagues, developing a graduate programme that was designed to deliver much better for everyone, and re-imagining the Thinkhouse website as a living content lab that shifts the conversation from client projects to youth insight and expertise.

Guiding Positive Change
Supporting — much loved cultural institutions to revitalise the way they interact with the public, communities and audiences. Helping Artsadmin build a more inclusive brand that deepened its place in the artistic and local communities they work with, or Abbey Theatre revitalise their brand, and rethink how a 120 year old institution interacts with a changing Ireland.

Expanding Positive Change
Connecting — service innovation, brand interactions, and digital platforms to create customer centred experiences. Shifting Showcase from a traditional trade show to a dynamic, interactive visitor journey, building an experience driven brand and bringing their unique hospitality experience to life for Breac.House, and helping burger business BuJo harness the customer experience to deliver value and difference.

Shaping Positive Change
Facilitating — businesses ambitious to modernise, and bring their products and services boldly into the 21st century. Supporting Japanese heritage brand Conde House to transform their position to reach new digital and international markets, and Cushendale to translate 250 years of expertise into an international lifestyle brand and digital platform.

Empowering Positive Change
Co-designing — thoughtful, caring approaches to services that needed human centred approaches to design and interaction. For innovative age in place initiative McAuley Place, Silvercloud, a mental health support platform working at scale, or putting students at the centre of everything with the student support and delivery service in DCU.

Crafting Positive Change
Elevating — artisinal brands and their interactions to match the quality of their products and level of ambition. Helping Burren Smokehouse highlight their handmade quality, Bean and Goose build a platform for stories told in chocolate, and jewellery designer Natasha Sherling bring her understated style and quality across all digital interactions.

Advancing Positive Change
Pushing — to drive positive change, in our world and the wider world. Launching our strategic design arm wove in 2020, to help change how things work for the better was the first step in really starting to understand who we are and what makes us tick. And going on a journey to become a B Corp in 2023 has helped us fully embrace it. It just took 21 years to get there.