Research Institute for New Organizational Strategy
The Research Institute for New Organizational Strategy is a think tank founded with the intention to identify structural flaws in the communication strategies of progressive organizers and politicians, and develop and propose alternative strategies. I am a member—roles are not further specified within the organizational structure—and I contribute mainly my experience in media theory and research.
Primary skills used:
Design thinking
Facilitation
Generative research
Brand design
Critical media theory
Logo Design
The Institute has a primary goal of avoiding media attention. In service of this goal, many aesthetic decisions about the group, including my graphic design, are intended to be unremarkable and subtly contradictory.
For example, the acronym formed by the words in the title is both the name of an animal and a common title for certain Republican politicians; for this reason, I chose a different animal to depict in the logo. The muted red, white, and blue color palette evokes the web design of hedge funds and conservative blogs. The URL for the organization, nostrat.org, theoretically follows from “New Organizational STRATegy,” but implies “no strategy,” the opposite of the group’s identity and function.
These design decisions appear to fly in the face of best practices in the field, but they serve the goals of the organization where those practices would not. Marketing conventions are optimized to consolidate the mental construction of a brand in an audience’s mind into a singular, clear object, which can be organized in relation to other clear mental objects without difficulty. The Institute neither needs nor wants to take up space in a mass audience’s mind; its purpose is to consult for individuals and institutions who strive to hold that presence, and splitting it by presenting a distinct brand face would be counterproductive.
Empathy Maps
I also led the Institute’s team in a number of workshop sessions during which we constructed empathy maps for a set of personas illustrating the sorts of professionals we hope to reach. The team was struggling to define the target audience for their intended research, and after a number of discussion meetings ending without clear resolution, I proposed that we hold some design thinking sessions, at which we made empathy maps for some target personas that the members of the Institute clearly defined as matching their target demographic.
3 to 6 members collaborated on these empathy maps each session, resulting in productive conversations that led to positive alignment between members on the target demographic and clearer steps forward for the Institute.
I intend to move forward with questions and assumptions sessions about the personas the team developed, to help define the ethnographic research needed to best reach these groups.
