Design Ecosystem

The Design Museum was supporting five research fellows. We helped them distill their work into a single memorable visualization.
Client

The Design Museum

Project TypeExplainers
A compilation of the final visualizations created for the Design Museum fellows, sat side by side on a plain blue background.

Behind everything we own, every service we use, lies a complex web of connections between different groups, individuals and businesses.

The Design Museum was supporting five research fellows who were studying how we could make these ‘design ecosystems’ more sustainable, circular and low-waste.

Our job was to help each of them distill their findings into a single memorable visualization.

The process began with a face-to-face workshop at the Design Museum. It was a chance to meet the fellows and chisel their ideas down into snappy concepts that we could refer back to as we continued through the design process.

Then we worked with the fellows individually. By immersing ourselves in each topic, we could find the right visual device for each one – a sunburst diagram for a sustainably-circular cosmetics industry or an illustrated infographic comparing different ways the UK could grow construction timber.

The final graphics offered accessible visual entry points into this vital research. Each fellow’s report is now helping show companies, policy-makers and other researchers how altering the way we design our products and services will pave the path towards the UK’s net-zero targets.

A process visualization titled 'Knitting a mycelium house'. Below the title and opening text is a diagram showing two types of bio-hybrid textiles and the process for creating them.
A visualization on the circular personal care ecosystem for Yorkshire. Next to the title is a sunbirst diagram showing the pieces of the personal care ecosystem surrounded by specific examples.
An illustrated landscape titled 'Mosaic landscapes' It shows different square landscapes, one with large monoculture land management and farming, and a more mixed and tiled landscape full of forests, fields and other landcapes densely mixed together.
On the left, a data journalist listens intently as a design museum fellow gestures and talks through her research.
Duncan Swain from Beyond Words is sat speaking to two of the Design Ecosystem fellows at the Design Museum.
Rebecca Conroy from Beyond Words listens as a Design Ecosystem fellow talks her through his research in the Design Museum.
A data journalist sits between two Design Ecosystem fellows at a table in the Design Museum. The journalist is looking at the design fellow to the left of the frame as she explains her research.

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