PG #35: Buzzwords vs reality

Two of our primary goals at Paper Giant are to build communities and start conversations.

This week marks a year since we moved into our current studio space in Melbourne’s CBD – a beautiful, spacious and light-filled room, which we’ve filled with modular furniture and whiteboards, and which we’ve tried to make feel and behave like a public library. Almost everything is on wheels, and we’re pleased with the way the space can shift and respond to the demands of project work as well as for public events.

At the time of our move, the space was much bigger than we needed. We committed to the lease because we knew it would become a key part of the infrastructure to achieve our longer-term goals. Over the last twelve months we’ve hosted a huge number and variety of events, both for and outside of the design community in Melbourne. This effort culminated in a massive May, during which we hosted four events.

Our ‘Diversity in the Innovation Ecosystem’ event for Melbourne Knowledge Week is the one we’re most proud of. We wanted to bring people together to talk about different forms of diversity and inclusion, and promote frank discussions about how it does or doesn’t work in practice, and I think we were successful. (Read a write-up of the event.)

In service of our goals though, it’s important that we don’t expect everyone to come to us. To that end, I’ll be heading to London at the end of June to run a workshop on Designing (and Surviving) for the End of Life at GOOD19, after which i'll be connecting with old and new design research colleagues at User Research London.

Right before then, we’ll be running our Design Research for Product and Service Innovation training in Melbourne. We’re thrilled to announce that this is sold out, but if you’re interested in getting better at collecting and working with qualitative data, details on the waitlist are below.

In the meantime, we hope that the spaces you make, are part of, and visit are rewarding, supportive and fun. We know that ours is. Make sure you drop by sometime.