A year on from the start of the pandemic, it’s become clear that taking a digital-first approach to projects here at Dare, and in the world beyond, has changed from being a preferential requirement to a mandatory prerequisite.

The need to accelerate consumers’ digital adoption and introduce them to new trends, forms the backbone of the briefs we are given these days. Yet there’s a hidden value in this, which is sometimes overlooked:

It is not easy to unlock this value in the product. It's like trying to look for gold: we need to search, dig and sift the ore. Then we need to wash, weigh and polish what we find.

Gold only becomes gold after a long, painful process - and many people give up in the middle of the journey.

Well, don't give up.

This process has been designed so you can learn with your audience, opening yourself up to a breadth of creative possibilities. There are 7 mindsets to bear in mind when you enter this journey: Empathy, Optimism, Iteration, Creative Confidence, Making, Embracing Ambiguity, and Learning from Failure.

You will diverge and converge with the other participants but be resilient and have these 7 behaviours at the front of your mind throughout.

The answers will come, eventually.

I know that so far, this sounds like a philosophy, but believe the process; this is a methodology and we have 3 core pillars for it: Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation.

Each pillar has different steps to be followed and different dynamics. At the first attempt to follow the methods, it will look like a big mess. But step by step, dynamic after dynamic, you will find convergence. The most important thing to have in mind at this stage is the seven mindsets I mentioned, above. If you incorporate these into your path, the journey to a definitive answer will be truthful.

So, you’ve shown resilience and followed the process. Now get ready for an answer that, at first, you might not understand but is what your project desperately needs.

As an example, in layman’s terms, it might be that you’re working on a commercial project and the client requests a video to be produced. But, after various sprints, you end up deciding a website is the optimum solution.

What I’m saying is, if you start to use this process, be prepared to face different routes to the answer. Get ready to embrace the inevitable failures. See them as a prize.

I appreciate you could say to me ‘Arnaldo, this sounds too abstract.’

Well, yes, it is.

Being a human-centred designer is about believing that, as long as you stay grounded in what you’ve learned from people, your team can arrive at new solutions that your client needs, not what they expect.

This is the road to unlocking assertive human values, and finding meaningful answers.