Our Big Day with the Wolff!

At King’s Cross Station, last Friday around two,

 a group of young wizards MACERs stood by a long queue,

And brave little Indie waited there in line,

so her classmates can take a photo in time,

before they all left platform 9 ¾

to the magical land of the Giant Wolff Olins!

Hmmm… Can we all scream: #EPICFAIL?! There goes my career as a poet. After all those years spent studying English Literature, I could safely conclude now (and I’m quite sure you all agree with me on this one): poetry is definitely not my forté. So for the sake of humanity, I will gladly leave it to the experts. Looking back on those years, I recall that  instead I was much more interested in novels and had a great talent for drama and the performing arts.

Enough with the walk down memory lane, I guess you are all wondering: What happened last Friday?
As you know, it is the end of the semester and final assessments and important milestones are creeping up on us, and so a visit to Wolff Olins was scheduled by the department for us to meet with Lead Strategist, Melissa Andrada joined by Senior Designer Rejane Dal Bello and strategist André Campbell. The purpose of the visit was to allow MACERs to present to the Wolff Olins team their business pitches and branding strategies in order to get as much advice and feedback as possible on how to move forward successfully with their business ideas. For those of you who are not aware what Wolff Olins does, let me explain it to you this way: besides helping ambitious leaders create game changing brands that drive growth, these guys were responsible for designing and creating the London 2012, Olympics.

Personal observations and reflection on the visit:

1- Possibly one of the best visits, and the most fruitful, we have had so far in the MACE program;

2- I felt very proud watching each and every one of my classmates present their business ideas. We have really achieved a lot in the last couple of weeks. You could tell some teams really progressed intensely in terms of ideation, content and presentation structure. Oh and I’m super in love with the “Memoby” idea 🙂

3- Hsiao- Kai Lin was definitely the star presenter of our team… I mean that man really knows how to capture an audience’s attention….. Goooooooo KAY…. I’m so happy that the long hours of rehearsal actually paid off 🙂

4- None of the teams’ wardrobe conveyed their brands’ identities or unified team’s spirit. Perhaps that is something we can consider prior to the Dragon’s Den presentation.

5- It’s funny how prior to the visit I had a 1001 questions to ask the Wolff Olins team, however, as soon as we sat down in that room and the word “presentation” came up all of a sudden asking my questions was weighed down by the nervousness that overwhelmed the room. And that’s something I will definitely regret, what a missed opportunity…. But honestly, for me it did not feel suitable with the way things were going to ask about the Olympics, the effect of the rise of digital on branding, or whether it is easier to work with unknown clients or with big names and companies that already have a huge heritage and fan base.

6- I found the talk about the difference between a strategist and a designer to be quite interesting. According to Rejane, a strategist thinks in terms of words and is usually closer to the client while the designer thinks more in terms of visuals and is closer to creativity. After hearing those words, one question was stuck in my mind: what happens if the designer and the strategist are the same person? Interestingly, I went back home and started researching about what happens when we mix the logical left brain with intuitive right brain. I came across  an interesting book that I am planning to add to my Christmas reading list by Guy Julier called: The Culture of Design in which the author discusses how design disciplines act and interact in the world. Julier also focuses in Chapter 3 on how an effective design strategist or design consultant can make use of the left-brain/right brain merger, or what is usually referred to as the “Third Brain Thinking,” as a self-identification process on how to approach design—which in its turn can consequently help those design consultants differentiate themselves from the rest of the market (Julier 2007, 46).

7- Before you progress further with your idea, make sure you ask yourself this question: Do you consider your product to be a university project, or do you look at it as a sustainable business that can grow and develop in the future? Once you have found the right answer, you must work accordingly.

8- Always look at the problem from a wider perspective. Due to limitations, you might be currently only capable of solving one part of the problem, but that does not mean that another part of the problem does not beg to be addressed as well.

Finally, as we kiss the ideation, initial strategy and prototyping phase goodbye and we are on the verge of embarking on a new phase that involves production and sales, I will leave you with these inspirational words by Michael Wolf. Believe it or not a long time ago my husband recorded the last twenty-four seconds of the interview on his phone, and since then he never misses an opportunity to play it over and over … and over and over…. for me to give me courage whenever I come across unfamiliar territory or I am about to face new challenges. The segment goes as follows: “The thing with design really… is never stop thinking that you can’t renew yourself, do it differently, see another way through and not be frightened by doing things you don’t know”—and that sentence right there summarizes in a nutshell the purpose of my journey at Kingston University.

For more class pictures about that day, click here

To find out more about how our team presented, click here.

PS. All trip pictures were courtesy of Dr. Corrine Beaumont.