Social Impact · 2023
The hardest brief is the one where you have to define the problem yourself.
A 10-week bootcamp at Experience Haus in London, run remote, with participants from Brazil, the UK, Spain, the US, India, Italy, and Poland. The brief was intentionally open: a real client, a real need, and a problem that hadn't been defined yet.
01 / Brief
The first phase happened as a full group: research divided across the cohort, interviews conducted with real people, findings shared and debated across time zones and cultural contexts. That process — messy, sometimes contradictory, always interesting — led each pair to their own problem statement.
The client also came with a new visual identity already developed. The constraint was real: work with what exists, make it work harder.
"Amanda is a soon-to-be social worker who wants to improve her abilities by taking an additional course — and wants to feel confident she chose the right one."
The landing page wasn't just a communication exercise — it was a trust-building problem. The user arriving at that page already knew they wanted to grow. The design's job was to make sure they felt certain they were in the right place.
02 / Collaboration
From a team to a pair.
The bootcamp moved through phases — full group exercises, then smaller teams, then pairs. Each reconfiguration changed the dynamic. Working with people from different countries and professional backgrounds meant constant negotiation: of priorities, of instincts, of what "good" looked like.
In the final pair phase, a larger share of the work landed here — partly by circumstance, partly by choice. The material that came out of it was thorough: structured, well-reasoned, and presented with enough clarity that it was recognised by both the professor and the cohort.
The professor left a "wow" reaction on the problem statement in class. Small thing. Remembered it anyway.
04 / What it taught
This was the project that made UX click.
The course had been chosen to become a better UI designer. What happened instead was a genuine surprise: the post-its, the affinity maps, the frameworks, the messy process of turning real conversations into a clear design direction — all of it turned out to be the part worth caring about.
That discovery changed the trajectory. Not just of this project, but of everything that came after.
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Arqgen — Land Feasibility Platform