home   themes   programmes   diary   resources
site map plain text
the helen hamlyn research centre: design for our future selves the royal college of art: postgraduate art and design

DBA Inclusive Design Challenge 2005

STIK / Corporate Edge

A four-part communications toolkit to help dyslexics in the creative industries take briefs, capture ideas and arrive at solutions that can be communicated to their clients. It is named STIK because "it prods you into action, gets you working, stops you getting stuck and ultimately helps things stick to memory."

Background

Dyslexia and creativity go together with an estimated quarter of RCA students dyslexic - a pattern repeated in the wider creative community. Corporate Edge met this complex challenge for their own industry to answer the question: How do you take a dry, prescriptive written brief and transform it into a process that assists dyslexic designers to explore, analyse and capture their ideas at every stage of design development and then play them back to the client?

How Does it Work?

Six areas were identified as causing difficulty at the briefing, ideation and presentation stages:

The solution centres on these strategies:

The toolkit has four elements:

STIK 1 -The Brief Story

Creative briefs and classic stories share a common structure and elements. STIK 1 translates them into a short story where background information becomes the setting; the client, their product and brand become the hero; obstacles are the villain; deliverables are the challenge and the desired result - the reward. The client enters briefing information on an A4 colour coordinated pro forma with the five briefing elements as headings. The project leader translates these into the story elements on the reverse of story cards. These contain illustrated symbols to prompt thoughts, make associations and trigger memory.

STIK 2 - The Cocoon

Dyslexics excel in generating ideas but have difficulty making sure they do not escape. STIK 2 - a portable, pocket-sized set of illustrated cards called Cocoons allows members of the creative team to sketch down their ideas and brainstorm at any time and anywhere. The illustrations are original, abstract and eye-catching and designed to allow ideas to be recalled through association with them.

STIK 3 - The Home

An organised display unit or 'cocoon bank' of variable size where Cocoons can be moved around or discarded. The client brief story cards sit at the top of the Home for reference throughout the project.

STIK 4 - Thought Support Map

The magnetic thought support map is a tracking tool that looks forward through the lifetime of a project to each stage of the process and everyone's respective role. Looking back, it allows the evolution of a concept to be traced for the final presentation. Milestone markers indicate stages of the creative process and there is a 'parking lot' is for rested ideas. Each team member has their own counter and by moving these along the map, it is clear who owns what and the stage it has reached. At each milestone, individual Thought Trackers record key thoughts on a concept, making it easy to piece together a presentation or story.

User Input

The prototype was developed with and tested on dyslexic graphic designers and experts in dyslexia and the strategies implemented internally.

Results

Corporate Edge have started to run their projects differently with dyslexic and non-dyslexic designers alike. They envisage an online STIK community updated with new downloadable elements as they evolve and a message board for tip-sharing.

Judges' Comments

We felt that STIK truly expressed the spirit of the DBA Design Challenge. Corporate Edge has lived the problem, engaged with it profoundly and passionately and truly taken ownership, in a unique way, of the creative potential that the challenge presented. We loved their idea of transforming a dry written brief into a story and saw immense potential in it as an open-ended educational product for the wider dyslexic and mainstream market. This is a story that hasn't reached the end!