What Can You Make with Creative Co-design?
Here at nooh you’ll often find us chatting about the power of co-design, but you might be wondering what you can actually use our favourite design method to create. The truth is, there’s not just one answer - co-design is a powerful tool for creating stronger designs of all kinds. But, it’s particularly useful for helping us to design more effective brands, videos, campaigns and events. Whether you’re trying to develop groundbreaking content, design audience-friendly videos, or create sustainable brand collateral, co-design enhances the design process and in turn the results. Let’s get into how…
1. Brands
Building a brand is about so much more than designing a logo and choosing a colour palette - it's about crafting a story that resonates with your audience. Co-design includes stakeholders such as employees and clients in the brand development process. Listening to their insights, values and ideas allows us to create brands and stories that are more authentic, relevant and appealing.
Co-design workshops also help us to uncover unique brand attributes, key messages and visual elements that truly reflect the essence of your organisation and connect with people. This collaborative approach fosters ownership and buy-in, leading to stronger brand loyalty in the long-run.
Just look at the work we did with the Co-op Foundation… For too long, young people have been left out of the decisions that affect them the most. The £4.5m Young Gamechangers Fund from Co-op, the Co-op Foundation and the #iwill Fund aims to tackle this head on with grants of up to £20k a year for young people. But to do this, they first needed a brand.
To create the branding for Young Gamechangers Fund, we used co-design - inviting 15 young creatives to join the nooh team for 4 weeks. Including young designers in the process helped to encourage engagement and build community.
2. Videos
Videos have become a cornerstone of how we communicate today, offering a dynamic and engaging medium to convey messages, tell stories and showcase brands. Co-design in video production involves collaborating with writers, designers and audience members to align creative vision, messaging goals and viewer preferences.
Involving a variety of stakeholders early in the process through storyboarding and scriptwriting workshops means co-designed videos capture diverse perspectives and incorporate valuable insights. Ensuring the final video resonates with the intended audience, communicates the message effectively and achieves the desired impact. We helped the NHS Universal Care Plan (UCP) team to do just that.
The Universal Care Plan is a service that allows patients to generate and share a care plan digitally with all healthcare service providers across the NHS. We created a series of short videos to promote their new Pan London NHS Digital Personalised Care Planning Programme. Using co-design to ensure the videos reached, and crucially connected with, their target audience.
3. Campaigns
The most successful campaigns are built on strategic planning and compelling storytelling. Because co-design brings together marketers, designers, content creators and audience members, it allows us to create strategies and content that drive engagement and achieve campaign objectives.
By co-creating in live, collaborative sessions, we can tap into the collective creativity, expertise and insights of diverse team members. Fostering innovation and relevance, and ultimately resulting in campaigns that resonate with audiences and deliver measurable results.
A great example of this is the Discharge Cards campaign by NHS London. Increasing numbers of people are healthy enough to leave hospital but can’t go home due to a lack of suitable products or services for their recovery. Discharge Cards can conveniently address this issue by providing people with the initial support they need to leave hospital quickly and safely. nooh worked alongside Joseph Fraser from NHS London and his team to create an impactful campaign that raised awareness of this innovative and important service.
Designed to increase usage across trusts, we conducted co-design at speed to impact outcomes over the fast-approaching winter. In addition to raising awareness of e-wallets, the campaign spoke to the hearts and minds of all those involved, highlighting the positive impact Discharge Cards can have on hospitals, patients and the wider community.
4. Events
Events provide a valuable opportunity for you to showcase your company and connect with your audience, so it’s important to get them right. Co-designed events invite everyone from event planners to speakers and attendees to be part of the design process. All to create the most memorable and impactful experiences.
Through co-design workshops, we can tailor experiences to meet the diverse needs and preferences of attendees. This collaborative approach ensures that events are relevant, engaging and aligned with your goals. Leading to increased attendee satisfaction, brand loyalty and post-event engagement.
The nooh team recently had the pleasure of working with Fulham Reach Boat Club, helping to develop fresh branding for their new event - the Youth Boat Race. The Youth Boat Race represents a transformative and educational initiative rooted in the belief that, in the words of Nelson Mandela, "sport has the power to change the world”.
We approached the project in the same way we approach all our work here at nooh - through co-design. This meant we designed the brand for the Youth Boat Race with the young people involved in the competition. Engaging in this co-design process with the young rowers not only led to more creative ideas, but increased engagement. Even before launch, the young people were already desperate to get their hands on the merch, t-shirts and medals we designed.
Co-design empowers us to collaboratively create brands, videos, campaigns and events that resonate, inspire and drive meaningful impact. But we get that knowing where to start can sometimes feel overwhelming. That’s why we’re here. We’re the creative co-design agency and we’d love to chat about your goals and how you can achieve them through collaborative design.
