New year, new DOTI: our plans for 2020
We’re heading into our third year of Design on the Inside events here at Snook (known to most of us affectionately as DOTI).
We started organising DOTI events because we wanted to create a space where people could share real stories of using design on the inside of organisations. We felt that building connections across sectors would ensure that great ideas and valuable lessons learned could spread and have a greater impact.
We’ve enjoyed bringing people together. Early in the morning, over pastries and coffee, we’ve explored how design is tackling some of the most important themes of our time: mental health, the housing crisis and user needs vs. business needs, to name but a few.
We took DOTI a step further last year when we hosted our first DOTI Fest: a day-long event made up of panel talks, fireside chats, keynotes and workshops, asking the question ‘how do we design a world where everyone can thrive?’
We brought together 30 speakers, 250 attendees and 30 Snooks. The energy, ideas and collaboration shared blew us away. If you missed it, you can read more about it here.
You might have noticed that Snook recently had a re-brand. We’ve identified 5 crucial missions areas: Thriving Planet, New Era Government, Good Business, Healthy Lives and Communities for All. You can read more about them here. This year, DOTI events will align with our mission areas — offering a space to explore what they mean in action.
What can you expect this year?
We’ve curated a programme of DOTI events for 2020, which will take place on alternate months in London and Glasgow throughout the year. These events will have two formats: breakfasts and fireside chats.
The breakfasts so far have been a roaring success, and we want to continue bringing panels of experts together to tell their unique design stories and answer your burning questions. In certain instances, we’ll experiment with shaking up the format; enabling attendees to hack a challenge together or offer their expertise.
Our fireside chats at DOTI Fest 2019 were a big hit. They provided an intimate space in which a speaker and someone they invited from their network had a candid chat about a topic in depth. We’re bringing these into DOTI programming for 2020. Fireside chats will run in the evening and will be slightly shorter, which we hope will appeal to those who can’t attend in the mornings.
Our second DOTI Fest will take place in September. We’ve spent time as a team reflecting on the macro and micro of DOTI Fest 2019: the coffee, the user experience, the expanse of ground covered in 1 day, the sustainability, the temperature, the after-party and what our hopes are for next time. We’ll be launching the event and tickets in the Spring, so keep an eye out to nab yourself an early bird!
Values of accessibility and sustainability guide all our work at DOTI. Last year, DOTI Fest was a semi-circular event, which meant we tried to eliminate waste and aimed for a supply chain which reused existing resources. The DOTI Fest audience were absolute champions with this; absorbing and modelling values of sustainability, bringing their own refillable water bottles and coffee cups, enjoying the vegan fare and our pledge to go cows-milk free. The name labels were made of seed-paper and we hope that lots of people managed to plant them and are looking forward to a crop of wildflowers in the summer! We’ll be bringing this approach to all DOTI events in 2020, big and small.
We want to ensure our DOTI breakfasts and firesides throughout the year are open to everyone. We have an inclusion policy, which means that we always reserve a number of free of cost tickets for those in under-represented groups in design. This includes, but isn’t limited to: those with a financial barrier to attending, LGBTQIA+ people, people of colour, women, non-binary people, and those with disabilities.
If we can do anything to support your attendance at an event, then please get in touch with Matilda on matilda@wearesnook.com.
Want to be part of the DOTI community?
We want to build on the momentum of DOTI Fest 2019 and take this further. We want to offer a space for a DOTI community to keep in touch. We’re in the process of putting together a mailing list, so if this is of interest, please sign up here.
We’d love to hear from you. Do you have an idea for a DOTI breakfast, fireside chat or session at DOTI Fest? Want to give some feedback about DOTI Fest 2019? Think we could be doing something better? Know an awesome speaker for us? Want to get involved by volunteering at DOTI Fest 2020? Think we’re missing something?
Contact Matilda on matilda@wearesnook.com (Events Manager) or doti@wearesnook.com if you have any suggestions, questions or just want to chat. Follow us on @weareDOTI for updates.
Please do reach out. It’s a conversation, and we’re listening.
