MANGATA
THE COLLECTIVE

Role:
Co-Lead
Designer

TEAM:
Sathvik Reddy
Abhishek Bakshi

TYPE:
Service design
Branding
UX

“The collective” was formed when like minded individual designers planned to come come together and establish a practice that they were happy with.

As few friends got togehter to enjoy themselves over a glass of milk(keeping it pg 13) ,they spoek of their adventures in their respective design fields. Something that most people do and over the span of comsuming a lot of milk, the conversation progressed to them realising that they were after similar objectives. Now thay they knew what they wanted, what was the next step forward?

I was brought on board to understand each stakeholders reason for being part of the collective and to design a strategy and help in creating the identiy.

In my experince when dealing with multiple stakeholders, we need to begin by understanding the discussion that have taken place and to make sure that all the views are taken into consideration. especially when we speak of creating an identity which will be the face of the oraganization. I feel if each person is taken into account then the identity is strionger as everyone feels connected to it.

By holding interviews with each individual, we were able to understand how everyone wanted to be involved in establishing this practice. A questionaire was prepared which aided us in these discussions and we were able to get a few insights and understand the clients better.

After the initial interviews we decided to do a design sprint, with a braod overview of the objectives I felt that it was ideal to make sure that everyone was on the same page when it comes to their goals and objectives. A good solution only comes when your problem is well defined.

The Objective

To establish furniture line and slowly expand to becoming a self sustaining multidisciplinary design collective of well established designers.

Understanding how other brand have positioned themselves in the market.

Based on the research conducted we analysed how other brands have positions themselves in the market. Presenting the stakeholders with these findings helped us defines our objectives much better and with a clearer mindset.

Its Design sprint time !!!

The objective of this design sprint were:
1. Understand the what, why and how.
2. Understand the 20yr road plan for everyone.
3. Establish the core principles that we everyone agrees with.
4. Understand the target audience.
5. Define the personality of the brand
6. Understand what the collective wont be.

The Outcome

Each participant was given a vote and dot voting was performed digitally to produce guidelines that the collective will be defined with and these guide lines can further go on to help create the branding for the collective which was later renamed “MANGATA” by popular demand and another voting session.

Remote design sprint was the first challenge, the next being finding an appropriate time for everyone to be free as everyone who is part of the collective has prior engagements in some form or the other.
fasilitating remotely was a fun challeng, its very easy to lose track of the objective and digress onto areas that we are yet to tackle.

My Learnings

The entire process was super fun to begin with, we were all inclined to getting the exact outcome that we needed, Post the discussion the team were divided into parts to focus on things life, brand Identity, social media and of course the actual pieces needed to be designed.

1. Its very hard to come to a conclusion when everyone is very set in their ways of thinking
2. Design sprints take a long time and since everyone has day jobs, we had to divide it and give everyone homework to do so the time spent on calls reduced. 
3. Common grounds between friends are easy to get to as compared to designer. LOL
4. It’s difficult to be on topic all the time when you’rer friends are involved