This guidebook design was a meta project on collaboration within a collaborative design team. Our brief was to take lessons for film industry collaboration and translate them for a design manager audience. We were first tasked with extensive research of the film industry, including interviews of a script supervisor, a Director of Photography, and First Assistant Director, a Actor, and more, all who work on large studio television shows and movies as well as a commercial film Director. Additionally, we crafted a survey that had over 30 film industry professionals participate. Our goal was to understand the mechanisms that enable a myriad of creative professionals to come together around a unified vision that culminates in a successful film.
We began to understand the intricacies as well as the big-picture process of film industry collaboration and mapped them out visually to better communicate our new understanding.
Our secondary research along with primary research (interviews and the survey) all began to show patterns that we affinitized into themes and then insights from the themes. These insights were further organized to create insight themes which became the structure for our Guidebook. As copy lead for the team, I wrote the narrative for our guidebook including the descriptions of each collaborative guideline (insight theme). Our team also developed custom activities that could help design managers put the ideas into practice. The overarching process we gleaned from film industry practice was combined with traditional design process models and comments from our interviewees. This new structure is called The Art of Design Doing, and it encourages designers to not feel stifled by gated processes and preparation but demonstrates that this structure enables the creative adaptability that film industry professionals have and that many designers could lean into.
From beginning to end, this project was carried out during the Covid19 stay-at-home order. Adapting collaborative techniques to digital spaces became a focal point of our project. Not only is our guidebook available online, but all of the activities in our guidebook are able to be done over video chat.
View the entire guidebook on ISSUU:
LARA ISAACSON 