Case Study: Ideas and D&AD Masterclasses

Idean, a global customer experience design agency, tasked D&AD with designing and delivering two D&AD Masterclasses over 2 days for their studio in Stavanger, Norway. They were looking to work on evolving their confidence and skills surrounding sharing ideas that are innovative, original and fearless, also wanting to upskill finding and developing these idea generating methods as a team.

“Rather than a specific problem that needed to be solved, the need for training was driven by a desire to broaden our horizons and experience how someone else would approach working styles and challenges. Some people had taken presentation skills workshops before and we wanted to stir things up as we knew D&AD did things differently”, said Stine Halvorsen, senior visual designer at Idean.

“With D&AD being a charity, we also knew the money would be going back into the design and creative communities, so it felt like a great way to give back. And, because I myself previously attended D&AD training I knew the high standard we could expect, so for me it was the obvious choice”.

“I know a few of the participants were quite nervous about presenting in general, not only externally to clients but sometimes also internally to other colleagues. So, we really wanted to improve our skills and boost our confidence in presenting our work overall”.

However, Idean also wanted something that would be beneficial to those who had a wealth of experience with client presentations. For those more experienced team members, the goal was to give them a refresher course and the chance to challenge themselves to present in a more personal, informal manner in contrast to the more corporate style.

Idean has an elaborate experience and an extensive library of workshops to help our clients come out of their shell and think more introspectively about their own services. But we felt that our internal ideation processes needed a boost. So, bringing a more of an advertising style “wild filterless brainstorm” into the mix felt like a great way to extend and build fresh ways of working.

Aside from courses that directly worked with these skills, the element of bonding and team building that might come from these exercises was a key driver too. Idean wanted the team “to get to know each other better in a way still related to work, through problem solving together”.

Working closely with Idean, D&AD’s Training team quickly established the courses that would be the ones best suited to their needs, narrowing it down to three. Then they were given the option to have a completely tailor-made course, blending all three together over two days, or a prepackaged option - two courses over two days. They went with the second, Ideas, Ideas, Ideas a session led by Arif Haq, and Presenting Creative Work with Tom Evans. “We really appreciated having the choice and now know how a bespoke option could be put together for us if we need something really specific in the future."

As some of the team had already attended a D&AD workshop before, they were even given an option to customize the briefs that they’d work on, but in the end decided it would be good to keep these the same and have a point of comparison.

We noticed an internal trend of the same people talking and presenting and the same people avoiding it. However, during the workshop Tom made sure that everyone tried it out and showed how presenting, something that might feel a little scary could be scaled down to something quite silly.

“We could present and talk about anything, even if it was just their favorite color. I loved how Tom shifted the focus away from  the topic we presented and challenged us to work on how we could use our personal stories in our presentations to connect with the audience.

“Adding this personal level helped encourage an empathy that people connected to and made us open up a bit more. It showed us that being vulnerable was a positive thing”.

“We gained more confidence presenting but also it was just as much a team building exercise that helped connect us to our coworkers in a different way. After we did the course, people are even looking forward to presenting and sharing, rather than dreading it. They have a different outlook on creating and talking about their ideas now, which is very positive.”

“The team is also open to more creative craziness now, thanks to Ideas, Ideas, Ideas”, and have taken on board a lot of new methods and processes to share in their own workshops with clients. As well as equipping them with a new set of tools - especially ones to help you get “unstuck” during creative block, “it’s also made us challenge our ideas a bit more – throw ourselves some curveballs and do more rounds before progressing to the next stages as D&AD made us experience, hands on, just how far we can stretch to improve our initial thoughts and ideas.”

“I think one of the most important things that came out of the experience was how we really got to know each other through both of these processes. Especially in Presenting Creative Work, I think people grew a lot from being pushed to do the presentation in front of everyone. Some were really nervous but, in the end, I believe it was those people that got most out of it”.

Most of all, I think it’s helped us all to make sure we are living up to our “Fearlessly human” slogan. If we’re going to expect that from our clients, we also need to expect it from ourselves. We want to challenge our team to constantly be fearless, so in a way, this training was our way of strengthening and continuing to do so.

D&AD Masterclasses power up careers and future-proof businesses by focusing on the creative skills of tomorrow, taught by the stars of today. Online and offline, our creative learning programmes connect you and your business directly to the people making the most outstanding work today and enable you to learn skills to generate brilliant outcomes tomorrow.