Design and the Market: Choosing a company to interview

'Being enterprising means thinking of yourself as a business in your own right.  How do you stand out from the crowd?''

-Hannah Clements

I found this quote to be of great relevance in the design and the market business today.  In thinking about what company would be suitable to investigate and interview for assignment one our group felt it necessary to pick a company that stood out from the crowd.

After emailing a number of architectural /interior /design practices, we heard back from a company called ''Icecream architecture.'' -who really do stand out from the crowd!

The company are called ''Icecream architecture'' because they pro-actively go out and interact with communities and potential clients, just like an ice cream van!  They firmly believe that the most important factor of a successful project is the client/designer relationship.  This is the reason why they strive to make architecture more accessible and stay in-touch with the needs of their client's.

Their entire concept is so unique due to the fact that they want to have a moveable office space so that they can tour different places within the UK to get amongst the people.  Their ice cream van raises attention no matter where they go and causes a reaction amongst children AND adults!  They often get asked ''Do you guys sell ice cream?'' to which they reply, ''No - we sell architectural design, community development, consultation, interactive workshops and service design.''

As part of our assignment we had to set out to find out how a company like this operates.  We had to take the following aspects into consideration:

• how they started up
• how they define their niche
• finance
• how they brand and market themselves
• how they organise and recruit
• how they grow

As a group of four, we carried out as much research as possible in advance on the company before constructing questions that would make up an interview.  We also had to prepare a consent form to concisely explain what our research was and how our findings would be used.

We look forward to constructing a 20 minute presentation to deliver our findings to the rest of our module group.