Design for

Design makes a difference. A ten year study of the Standard & Poor’s index shows design-led companies outperformed other organizations by 211%.

Empathy works alongside leaders who want to create lasting impact through human-centered design.

We bring deep expertise in anthropology, product and service design, business strategy and communications. We gather customer insights and use these to design innovative solutions.

Together, we help our clients form lasting relationships with their customers and see better returns.

Our work starts with the people our clients care most about.

It’s not market research. We draw on ethnographic techniques  to explore and uncover a person’s behaviours and underlying emotions and belief systems in the context of their lives.

This may mean understanding how a large investment company’s young customers act, think and feel about retirement. It may also mean uncovering the shared needs and pain points of one of the most important sectors of a nation’s economy.

But we provide more than insights.

Our anthropologists, designers and business consultants analyze field data to uncover valuable new business opportunities. We use these customer insights to design actionable and achievable solutions for our clients.

A national bank may embed a culture of innovation throughout their organization with coaching and hands-on courses taught by design leaders. Designing a comprehensive wayfinding system at an airport can solve one of the most common travel anxieties.

No matter the solution, we prototype and test our designs with our client’s customers and stakeholders throughout the process.

 We help our clients brings these opportunities to life by supporting them and building staff capabilities right through to full implementation.

Build sustainable capability in organisations.

We help our clients realise their design potential through tailored capability-building programmes. Short courses can be a good way to introduce design mindsets and approaches to individual people. But trying to grow company-wide capability one person at a time doesn’t work.

Design Potential shapes a detailed plan for organisations wanting to improve and innovate through human-centered design. Our clients are supported to put the customer at the heart of everything they do — systems and processes, teams, training, organisational structure, metrics, physical and digital environments, philosophy, leadership, and the connections between each of these.

With coaching from expert designers, our clients strengthen internal capability. They lead engaged teams with clear direction, and create products, services and experiences of real value for their customers.