Matchmaking designers and SMEs

A DTI-funded body, the Design Council is tasked with enhancing prosperity through promoting the use of design. While design-level advice helps companies succeed - for example by growing faster and charging more - most small to medium sized companies don’t take advantage of this advice in their product or service development. The Design Council looked to Engine for help to develop the programme and tools for a national campaign of workshops for small business owners and designers. Business owners would learn about the benefits of using design and designers would become better equipped to service the needs of business.

A matchbox workshop with small business owners, London, 2005.

We began with a creative process of research, analysis, development and testing, interviewing small business owners, their advisors and designers to develop the content for an effective, versatile solution. While gathering and analysing information, we drew upon our extensive workshop planning experience to create and refine tools for training workshop participants.

The result an effective, inspirational reference tool called Matchbox - and the workshop programme with which to introduce it to its users. As a card-based ‘mind-mapping’ tool, Matchbox provides designers with a way to learn about their clients in order to better develop new business and provide the most useful services possible. It also helps business owners and their advisors to explore the diversity of ways in which design can make important improvements to a company’s success beyond just the way something looks. To complete the project, Engine wrote the workshop scripts and trained the workshop facilitators.

Matchbox and the accompanying programme have been so successful in providing information and inspiration that the DTI have decided to distribute it nationally.