Future Friendly – 2023 Good Design Team of the Year

THIS ACCOLADE CELEBRATES A DESIGN TEAM WHO CONSISTENTLY PERFORMS AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL IN THE ANNUAL AUSTRALIAN GOOD DESIGN AWARDS AND HAS ESTABLISHED A TANGIBLE DESIGN-LED CULTURE WITHIN THEIR ORGANISATION. THE AWARD AIMS TO INSPIRE COMPANIES TO BUILD AND MAINTAIN A DESIGN-LED CULTURE THROUGHOUT THE WORKPLACE.

Future Friendly believes that the products and services we engage with every day directly affect the wellbeing of ourselves and our environments. This means that our society and world’s greatest challenges and joys – climate change, financial wellbeing, mental health, diversity,  inclusion, education – can be faced, challenged or emboldened to change lives for the better.

It’s why, for almost two decades, Future Friendly’s Founders Nick Gower and Jon Christensen – alongside their team – have been fuelling constructive impact by the way of design. They innovate everyday services that lead positive change at scale, combining strategy, conscious design and hands-on product and service development to make it happen. 

Future Friendly’s human-centred innovation has earned 27 Good Design Awards as they’ve broken new ground with the likes of the Commonwealth Bank, Defence Health, Service NSW and the ABC. Their decorated approach has empowered organisations Australia-wide to make their good intentions real.

Future Friendly’s penchant for positive impact was celebrated this year with the 2023 Good Design Team of Year Award. It not only recognises the team’s incredible work, but also their internal commitment to nurturing a design-led, people-first culture. Good Design Australia caught up with Nick Gower and Jon Christensen to reflect on the team’s inspiring journey, discuss their recent acquisition by Ernst & Young (EY) and explore the potential of design to lead true impact. 

Future Friendly – 2023 Good Design Team of the Year Award

Good Design Australia: Fresh off the heels of a milestone acquisition by EY, please tell us a bit about the Future Friendly philosophy and what it means to slide alongside such a massive team.

Nick Gower: We’ve been doing Future Friendly for 19 years, or since 2004, and our design philosophy involves delivering impact through what we call everyday services. They’re the things like bank accounts, passports, doctor’s appointments, benefits programmes – things that people don’t necessarily think of as being exciting, but shape the world around us. They affect how our communities can access everything from leisure to medical services, how they connect as people and just have such an enormous effect, even though they’re sort of in the background.

This means, to make the biggest impact, we need to deal with companies, organisations and governments that have scale. So, we started looking for a partner who could support us with the delivery of the scale services, both from a technology perspective and from a compliance and regulation perspective. Then we met EY, and they fit the bill. They’re really excited to go on that journey to support a design studio and approach that focuses on large transformation projects in government and in private businesses with humans at the centre. So we took the opportunity to push ourselves to increase the scale of our impact.

GDA: As it’s clearly embodied in the Future Friendly vision, how would you describe design’s potential to bring about positive impact?

NG: I think, to me, the word design or to be a designer means to always combine two things. It means you’re always leading and you’re always making. If you’re balancing those two things, you’re leading the process of making, whether that’s a building or website or anything else, you you have a responsibility and an opportunity to affect the lives of the people that engage with it. 

That’s the opportunity that we’ve led into. We’ve really taken on the responsibility of understanding the impact of the stuff that we make, and in that found opportunities to help people. So I think design is the process of making an impact.

GDA: How important is human-centred design in these socially-conscious design processes?

NG: We focus on a really hands-on research and design approach that engages communities. The communities that use these services are the ones that should be leading the creation of those services, and their needs and voices should be brought into that process. To me, that includes both including them, but also delivering for them. It means doing more than just talking and listening. It means making and allowing them to participate through the creation process. 

I feel like for there to be progress for groups of people, you need a mix of both empathy and entrepreneurialism – understanding and action. Empathy without action is just focus groups and talking, listening and endless consultation without necessarily solving or helping bring to life the true solutions. On the contrary, entrepreneurialism by itself is just unbridled consumerism, and we know where that takes you.

Jon Christensen: That approach extends to the whole team – being able to be in front of and understand how and what people need from things so they can solve it together. This way, there’s no chain of command and you can create a safe space for the design team, government departments, clients and the community. It helps everyone understand what they need and what needs to sort of change to get them what they need – what will benefit them the most.

Future Friendly – 2023 Good Design Team of the Year Award

GDA: Looking to the Good Design Team of the Year Award, it celebrates teams that cultivate that design culture of creativity, leadership and engagement. How do you encourage that within the Future Friendly workplace?

NG: Through participation, honestly. We want to get out of the way of inspiring designers – those who see design as a vocation, a life’s calling – so we can create space for them to feel secure to try and fail. We want to allow them to build a cadence that offers enough structure to be able to do the messy thing that is design. We want to be there to support them when they fall over and encourage them to give things another try. Creating a really emotionally secure place to engage with the problem is all you really need to do.

GDA: It sounds like these principles have been very innate to the Future Friendly since the very beginning. What does it mean to be celebrated for it with the Good Design Team of the Year Award?

NG: I think to be recognised as a design team is something that we’re really excited about. We don’t believe that that design can be done by an individual. Design is a team sport, and our entire business is set up around creating design teams, full-time teams of people that work on one problem at a time until it’s solved. We believe that’s the secret to the way we work because it creates this really great relationship and this unbelievable focus in a really safe environment of collaboration. Winning this award really goes to the heart of who we are, and I’m super proud to be able to say that we built the best design team this year.

JC: The Award is also a really powerful tool that shows, to the teams and organisations we work with, the positive outcome that has been created. A lot of people might focus on the process side of design or what it is that designers need to do, but the Award is the pinnacle proof that all the efforts and impact has been recognised. It shows the community value is being celebrated.

GDA: Looking outwards at the design space as a whole, what would Future Friendly describe as “good design”?

JC: A hard one! Good design is probably just as simple as something that actually impacts people in a positive way. Like, it doesn’t matter about the process or whatever, it’s just something that has an outcome. It’s not something that you do for yourself, it’s not your own process to go to or your own learning moment, it’s something that you’re doing to help other people

NG: We always consider design to be the process, but I guess good design is the outcome – the impactful products, services and things. Compared to other designers, we’re not really academics right? [Laughs] We’re just makers. We don’t spend much time talking and thinking about the definition of good design, because we’re just trying to do it. We’re just the people who solve problems.

VIEW ALL 2023 GOOD DESIGN AWARD WINNERS HERE

2023 Good Design Award of the Year – BioScout

THE GOOD DESIGN AWARD OF YEAR IS AWARDED TO ONLY ONE EXEMPLARY PROJECT ACROSS ALL DESIGN DISCIPLINES AND CATEGORIES.

Agricultural growers traditionally rely on their own intuition and symptomatic indicators to manage crop disease. While the incredible knowledge and experience of the world’s growers cannot be understated, these orthodox approaches can sometimes leave room for ailments to take hold unknowingly, or misguide overseers down damaging avenues of management and overspraying. 

In the face of an increasingly organic world, growing agricultural costs and a greater understanding of the possible adverse effects of disease eradication measures, the BioScout team recognised an opportunity for a revolutionary technology to fill in the blanks. The result was a world-first airborne disease tracking device that equips growers and agronomists with autonomous insights into a crop’s microclimate.

The BioScout system is a self-sustaining, solar-powered unit that sits harmoniously in fields and vineyards. Using an in-built spore sampler and an array of sensors, it captures airborne particles in real-time, collecting location and disease-specific data that is uploaded to a cloud-based server. Machine learning algorithms are then applied to identify and classify spores at speed before notifying farmers and allowing for immediate action.

BioScout sees the unseeable in a range of complex agricultural settings and can function continuously for years without human intervention. By detecting issues early on, it empowers growers to rely less on chemical spraying and promotes healthier, higher-yield crops. Already, the device has seen incredible success out in the field, affording farmers and viticulturists a means to take the guessing game out of their disease control measures. Bioscout has also earned itself the prestigious Australian Good Design Award of the Year for 2023. 

Good Design Australia went back and forth with Lisa Gyecsek and Robert Tiller of Tiller Design, who collaborated closely with the BioScout Team, to dive deeper into the incredible innovation.

Good Design Australia: It’s commonly said that the agricultural space is rooted in tradition, so how would describe the role design, and specifically technological design, plays within the industry?

Lisa Gyecsek: I think there actually is a lot of technology out there. The universities are producing amazing inventions and having amazing success with a lot of the theories and findings. The big challenge really in the industry, is making that leap into commercialisation and making it into a product that is useful for the masses. That’s where it comes unstuck, and I believe that’s because it’s a journey that’s not familiar to a lot of people.

BioScout is a perfect example of people coming together with a great idea, passion and the industry smarts, to coordinate it well and make a difference. 

GDA: BioScout aims to see the “unseeable” diseases in a crop. How exactly does it target and detect these ailments?

LG: It catches and identifies a range of spores and algae. It uses a carefully regulated airflow intake to draw in the surrounding air, across an adhesive film, to trap and collect airborne pathogens, pollens and particles. It’s like putting a roll of sticky tape out into the wind and collecting what’s there. It knows all the environmental conditions around its capture and the exact timestamp of when it was caught, and then uses high definition, microscopic photographic imagery to zoom in and identify what it finds.

The collected data is securely sent to the cloud and into a live database where information surrounding any detected spores or disease is sent out as an alert to a farmer, or whoever’s interfacing with it. They will immediately know, in real-time, what’s happening out there in the crop environment.

GDA: How did the design journey begin? 

LG: Tiller Design was engaged by BioScout, and they basically had a proof of concept that we took apart and redesigned in order for it to be a commercial product. That meant re-engineering the product, which we did in 3D CAD, and assembling it all so that each part is reproducible on a manufacturing scale. So, injection moulding, die casting, fabricating any jigs and fixtures that needed to go together, making sure that the assembly held and optimising the critical architecture of the internal fans and the cameras. We also ensured the right material was selected so it didn’t disintegrate under UV light and that the housing was able to hold larger capacity batteries.

One of the main features that the BioScout team asked us to incorporate was a spore-collecting cassette tape that was user friendly. We needed to ensure it didn’t require the hand of any highly-skilled technicians to go out and change it, and that anyone could swap cassettes in and out without breaching any of its structural integrity. Before we were engaged, the cassette was non-existent. 

GDA: BioScout seemingly offers a transformational solution within the agricultural space. How would you describe design’s potential to revolutionise industry, especially in the face of an increasingly organic agricultural world?

Robert Tiller : That’s a big question, where to start? The potential for design to help is enormous. Designers are generally curious people, inquisitive people, and we’re not afraid of big problems. The challenge of solving complex problems actually makes things exciting. So, in the context of large scale agricultural issues, we’re very excited to get involved and start using design skills, design capabilities and curiosity to help create new ways of doing things.  

Skilled design leads to devices, services, and objects that people interact with. Inherently, getting anything to market and meeting all the various conflicting requirements that something might need is in better hands if they’re design hands. Lots of people need help to process and action change, and a key role designers play is to facilitate that change. 

A design mindset leads a powerful way of thinking. It facilitates change and helps give clarity to complex problems. 

GDA: Zooming out even further, how would you define the concept of ‘good design’?

RT: I think there’s an under rated ingredient in the concept of good design – the tuning into and use of empathy. There’s a lot of emphasis and talk about human factors, human centred design, usability, commercial success, the general improvement of use – it’s always in a very human centric context. 

When you step out into something like the BioScout project, you start to see the environmental context, the interplay with people and the environment. Id like to see more emphasis in design on our holistic place in the environment. We’ve got to use our empathy and creativity to look at the holistic nature of what we do. Good Design takes all things into consideration.

GDA: Moving away from the concept of human-centred design?

RT: Not exactly, consideration to a bigger frame of reference – it’s not just people it’s also the environment. Human-centred design is obvious for me. If you’re designing anything it’s got a human centric focus. Good design, and the whole prospect of engaging with a good design team, is to affect an outcome that’s positive. That outcome needs to be positive on many fronts, not just commercial, usability, but its general impact. As it lives as a thing in the world, it has impact, and we should be directly responsible for that impact. 

LG: Agreed. Good design is understanding really what the problem is and justifying that it’s a problem that needs to be solved.

RT: Yes, that’s a really understated point. It’s so important to pause and check that the problem you’re solving is actually one that needs solving, because design, by its nature, is cyclic. 

LG: A product’s whole lifecycle is often unspoken, but it’s up to a good designer to consider the whole circle of that product’s life. It means assessing that a new design actually meets a lot more requirements than the brief that’s behind the whole project in the first place. 

So, the task in itself to be good, is actually far greater than usually it sets out to be in the beginning.

VIEW ALL 2023 GOOD DESIGN AWARD WINNERS HERE