Dr Temidayo Eseonu, a researcher at Lancaster University

The brief

We had been working with Dr Temidayo Eseonu on another project facilitating a collective working around knowledge justice, and had spoken about how we were using games in our work. She was interested in how that might work in her research context—working with racially minoritised young people to explore their experiences of racial injustice and how to create deeper cultures of belonging in education.

Whilst we initially scoped a project around using games to communicate key themes of the research to public policy stakeholders, Dayo became more interested in the experience creation side of our practice. Her research had identified that the biggest impact on racially minoritised young people’s felt sense of belonging was the racist underpinnings of the education system’s practices, narratives, and rules. Whilst a game that communicates knowledge to public policy stakeholders might have been useful, Dayo was more interested in how the game might transform the pedagogy and practices of teachers to support them to be more bold in challenging their own practices, and their schools’ practices, narratives, and rules.

What we did

• Identified the key themes and insights from Dayo’s research
• Explored some initial game concepts and mapped out potentially relevant mechanics
• Found a clear narrative hook for the game and selected appropriate game mechanics
• Playtested with three teachers based in the North East of England
• Redesigned the game around playtest insights
• Designed the visuals of the cards and the gamebook
• Wrote the games’ rules and typeset them

What we learned

• The value of game hacking as a way into game design. Our knowledge of games like Fiasco, For the Queen, and Dialect helped us to think quickly about how different types of game could shape different experiences, and helped us to communicate these concepts clearly.
• How to bring a client on a game design journey. It’s a really unusual and different way of working for most people, so we need to be careful about how we communicate game mechanics—and ideally just need to play some games together to help give a sense of what it might be like.
• We much, much, much prefer in-person game design and playtesting. We can pick up things and move them around and have a really enjoyable time together. For people that haven’t played many games, it’s much easier to communicate what something means or might feel like. It also means we can eat delicious food together and really connect whilst we work.
• The importance of playtesting! Our early assumptions about what might work for the game were thrown out of the window as soon as we started our playtest with the intended players of the game. We found more useful ideas, more playful circumstances, and some of our assumptions were proved wrong when people loved roleplaying, even when they weren’t typical roleplayers!

What we made

• Belonging, a role-playing game for teachers and other educators that helps them identify ways to shift their pedagogy and school practices and processes to create cultures of deeper belonging for more students and staff

Belonging is a role-playing game for teachers and other educators that helps you identify ways to shift your pedagogy and school practices and processes to create cultures of deeper belonging for more students and staff.

No prior experience of role-playing games necessary.

Play online or print at home

The pdfs are print at home versions of the game. Use the “Print and play” files and a copy of the Instructions.

The “Print specification” document should tell you everything you need to know to get these profesionally printed.

Credit

Belonging was developed by Dr Temidayo Eseonu, Kieran Cutting, and Oliver Bates.

Contact

If you’re looking for someone to facilitate this game at your school, or are interested in research collaboration, contact Dr Temidayo Eseonu: t.eseonu@lancaster.ac.uk

Interested in designing a game like this about your research, for engagement, impact, or even data collection? Get in touch with fractals co-op: hello@fractals.coop

The game is called ‘Yee haw! The wild west of user research ethics’, not because user researchers are wildly unethical but because user research does not have an agreed framework or consistent approach for ethics. As user research tries to find its place alongside longer-established and overlapping practices in the public sector like social research, medical research, Quality Improvement, or citizen participation, it can find itself in a wild west. 

I designed Yee-haw with Soh-yon Park to reflect our experiences as user researchers in the NHS and various central government departments. We have noticed that a lack consistency in user research ethics has resulted in:

• Questions about the legitimacy of user research
• User research plans being subjected to inappropriate ethics governance 
• User research plans going ahead with little or no ethics process
• User researchers feeling uncomfortable and unsupported in their jobs.

Yee-haw is a rules light, collaborative game that brings together a number of things that make tabletop roleplaying games so effective for imagining and experiencing social change and different futures: 

• Creating space for growth through imagination to aid in practicing new skills, facing fears, and gaining confidence for addressing things in real life
• Helping players explore self-expression by experimenting with hidden aspects of themselves and trying out new roles 
• Encouraging people to imagine different perspectives and experiences through story and roleplay
• Strengthening strategic skills through collaborative decision-making, systemic thinking, and problem solving 
• Providing a creative outlet to process emotions, reflect on workplace dynamics, and rehearse responses to real-world challenges
• Foster connection and community by bringing people together through shared storytelling and co-creation of new worlds. 

Try Yee-haw for yourself! You can download all the workshop material below under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0. Start with the facilitator script to understand how the game works and to organise your own workshop around the game. All you need a 20-sided die and creative moxie and you’re ready to create new ethical futures for user research! 

You might be familiar with fractured signals and their attempts to help people learn to harness their own power: An Introduction to Futureweaving, the Museum of Lost Futures... You're probably less familiar with Singularity, who try their hardest at every stage of history to destroy, compress, control.

To avert one of the many beautiful futures you might build, Singularity have flattened your timeline. To reconnect with your inner power to harness possibility, you will have to complete The Ritual of Rebinding and learn how to see through the eyes of other versions of yourself.

The Ritual of Rebinding is a play experience about the different paths our life could have taken, for any number of players.

For now, The Ritual of Rebinding can only be run by those that have learned the ritual in depth. Get in touch with us if you're interested in playing.

Credit

The Ritual of Rebinding was developed by Kieran Cutting, initially commissioned for Multiplatform 2025.

License

CC-BY-SA

To play, deal every group a value, object, and mood card. Each group should talk about how their cards can come together: ‘How can you combine your value and object to create your mood?’ 

After giving people time to come up with as many ideas as they want, we hit them with a disruption card and a prompt: ‘How will you have to alter or change your ideas as a result of the disruption?' 

For example, how can you combine fairness with bread to create hope? Maybe you imagine a fair distribution of bread programme that gives people hope because everyone has regular access to nutrition. There are beautiful bread commons set up in communities where people gather and share food. With full bellies and convivial spaces, hope springs. Then, with the disruption that ‘The most connected people take the largest share of resources’, the question becomes how to design our bread programme to mitigate, prevent or leverage the most connected people taking the largest shares.

It's great to use at the beginning of a creative workshop to get people's minds going.

Play online or print at home

The pdfs are print at home versions of the game. 

The cards are suitable for printing on standard playing size cards, so would need rearranging for printing on A4/letter.

Credit

The Tomorrow Deck was developed by Leah Lockhart and Kieran Cutting.

License

CC-BY-SA

If you're interesting in hearing about how we can support academics to use games for research, engagement, and impact, you can find out more here.

As all good temporal archaeologists will know, the Museum of Lost Futures exists outside of time and space and moves from place to place, showing up in the places it's most needed. It’s a museum filled with objects from lost futures and possible histories, things outside of time, existing orthogonally to our current timeline.

Visitors to the Museum of Lost Futures will be given the opportunity to connect with an object from the Museum's collection and use this to explore their own personal timeline, sliding door moments and lost futures. By visiting the Museum, you'll develop your futureweaving skills, helping you to harness raw possibility as you shape our collective future.​​

The Museum of Lost Futures: The Ritual of Rebinding is an immersive play experience about lost futures for any number of players.

In its initial run, the Museum of Lost Futures focused on abolitionist futures, reproductive justice, and haunting. Taking the form of a museum outside of space and time, the Museum of Lost Futures guided two participants at a time through encounters with objects from possible futures and alternative histories, and the stories stories from the people attached to those objects. This leads into conversations about our desires for the future, what haunts us, and what chains us in our lives.

The files below will give you a taste of what the original experience was like.

We're working on a portable game version of the Museum right now, so check back in the future for an experience you can try.

About the downloads

The downloads above contain some images of the Museum, the audio files that played throughout the Museum, and some supplementary materials that might help you get to grips with what being at the Museum was like.

Credit

The Museum of Lost Futures was developed by Kieran Cutting and Dr Mwenza Blell.

License

CC-BY-SA

As it's a game for self-reflection, you may want to use the cards as part of a journalling activity, or incorporate them into any other mindfulness or professional development work you do. The files below include a 2 week reflection process you can follow, which the first players of the game experienced through a series of phone calls.

We're currently working on a new version of fractured signals called An Introduction to Futureweaving that should be available later in the year. Get in touch if you're interested in keeping up to date with its development.

Play online or print at home

The pdfs are print at home versions of the game. 

The cards are suitable for printing on tarot size cards, so would need rearranging for printing on A4/letter.

Credit

fractured signals was developed by Kieran Cutting, with illustrations and visual design by Daniel Parry.

License

CC-BY-SA

It is for 1-4 players and takes around 30 minutes to play.

The aim of the game is to make enough money to pay rent, by taking courier jobs delivering food and groceries by bicycle, and dealing with the challenges of this kind of work.

What does it look and feel like to be in the saddle, with a bag full of hot food on your back, as your traverse city high-rises looking for the address of customer? What is the financial impact of waiting around all day for work that never comes? Is it worth pushing your luck and taking a risk if it makes the difference in wages?

What does it look and feel like to be in the saddle, with a bag full of hot food on your back, as your traverse city high-rises looking for the address of customer? What is the financial impact of waiting around all day for work that never comes? Is it worth pushing your luck and taking a risk if it makes the difference in wages?

The lived experiences of cycle couriers are often invisible to consumers. Their needs can side-lined by app-developers who focus on the customer experience rather than that of the worker.

Meal Deal invites players to share experiences that gig economy cycle couriers face. When we say gig economy courier we mean workers who access work through platforms like Deliveroo or UberEats and deliver food, medicine, and other consumer goods on their bicycles.

Play online or print at home

The pdfs are print at home versions of the game. 

The cards are suitable for printing on 62x100 size cards (UK "Trump" sized) so would need rearranging for printing on A4/letter.

Credit

Meal Deal was developed by Oliver Bates and Ben Kirman.

Card illustrations and visual design by Emily Martin. Illustration and visual design for the logo and rules by Tony Pickering (Pick-Art).

License

CC-BY-SA

The Care Journeys team in Barnardo's, the UK's largest children's charity.

The brief 

Care Journeys was set up as one of Barnardo's Core Priority Programme areas as part of their 2016-2025 strategy. Their vision was to create a world where: "Everyone who interacts with a care journey - whether young person, professional, parent or carer, or something else - feels loved, supported, and given opportunities which matter to them."

In 2022, in support of that vision, Care Journeys commissioned us to find out more about how community-based support (such as mentoring) can support care-experienced young people through life transitions and help them to develop positive relationships. They wanted a strong research base to start influencing and advocacy work from, so wanted to learn lessons from a mentoring service elsewhere inside of their organisation.

What we did

• Scoped a research project around community-based support and mentoring, using the Manchester Care Experienced Service as a case study
• Held interviews with 18 mentors, mentees, volunteers and staff members
• Developed a research report about the benefits of community-based support for both mentors and mentees
• Created a service blueprint with clear points of consideration, so that other people can start up mentoring schemes for care-experienced young people

What we learned 

• Mentoring helps mentees to "build their world" by creating community connections, helping people with feelings of isolation, and building their confidence.
• Mentees value a mentor who cheerleads them, actively listens to them, and who can give them guidance and support, rather than telling them what to do.
• The non-professional nature of the mentoring relationship was really valuable, as it created a sense of authenticity and flexibility, and evolves naturally over time. It helps to create connections that might not otherwise have existed, which can be valuable, meaningful relationships.
• People became mentors because of a desire to "give back", to help people with experiences they've had in the past, or to live their own values.
• Mentoring is a reciprocal relationship—the mentor learns from their mentee just as much as the opposite happens. This can help people destigmatise some experiences and help people to learn about situations they might not know about.
• A good mentor knows to confront their preconceptions and expectations, and take their ego out of the relationship. You can't be an effective mentor if you approach the relationship with a clear idea of what you’re going to do for your mentee, because their needs may be different to what you imagine.
• Mentoring / community-based support can be a really impactful intervention for care-experienced young people, but there are few community-based support offerings to young people over the age of 18. Community-based support seems to be of even greater benefit to Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children, as mentoring can help them to get to know their local area, build their skills in spoken and written English, and to both acclimatise to the UK and to find communities that speak their language and are familiar with their culture.
• This was our first project as an incorporated organisation, so we also learned a lot about how to effectively work together, what our shared research practice might look like, and what project management processes we needed to develop.

What we made

• A research report, exploring the experiences of care-experienced mentees and community-based mentors
• A service blueprint for mentoring/community-based support for care-experienced young people

Both of these can be found on the Barnardo's website.

No client this time—this was a collaboration with Dr Mwenza Blell.

The brief 

Mwenza wanted to collaborate on a project that brought together our work on building imagination and creating new possibilities and her work on reproductive justice, surveillance and data, and the idea of haunting. We developed a brief for the project together focused on experiences of haunting, reproductive justice, and supporting abolitionist practice.

Finding our shared interests

We met with Mwenza over a period of a few months to work out the boundaries of our shared interests. We settled on haunting, reproductive justice, and abolitionist practice because of the overlaps we saw between these areas. Reproductive justice isn't just about the right to have or not have a child, but the ability of people to raise children in worlds that support their ability to grow up well, safe, and healthy. It has to affirm people's ability to live. In contrast, carceral systems limit or reduce people's ability to live through the restriction of their freedoms. Whilst these life-limiting systems affect much of society, they disproportionately affect Black people. So reproductive justice requires abolition.

Mwenza's work has previously explored the relationship between haunting and reproductive justice. Her work builds on Avery Gordon's idea that haunting is how abusive systems of power make their impacts felt, especially when they are supposedly over and done with, or when their oppressive nature is continuously denied. In this project, then, we wanted to explore people's individual relationships to haunting in relation to reproductive (in)justice, and carceral systems.

What we did

We've developed projects previously that are centred on creating fictional alternative worlds for people to step into, imagine different possibilities, and bringing something back to their lives from these fictional worlds. This is pretty standard speculative design practice—creating something as if it's come from another world, some future or past, and seeing how people interact with it. In this project, though, we wanted to explore what it was like to give people more of a felt sense of these different futures. What does it feel like to live in a future where there is reproductive justice and carceral systems have been abolished? How can people take that feeling forward?

To do this, we decided to make an immersive experience for this project: The Museum of Lost Futures//Archive of Found Histories. The experience that we developed centred on objects that we designed from potential futures, histories, or pasts, stories written by Mwenza based on her research attached to each of these, and an audio soundscape that guided people through the space.

Because we wanted to explore how to help people feel different kinds of feelings, we wanted people to feel safe in the room, so we asked everyone who attended to come with someone that they cared deeply about and felt comfortable with. We wanted to use this relationship as a design material in the room: if people could experience this with someone that they already had a deep relationship with, their ability to imagine different futures and bring something from those futures forward into their lives might be increased.

In the experience itself, two people who are close would enter the space together, be greeted by Mwenza or myself, and then be told in the waiting room. Then, the audio soundscape would begin to play, and a voice would welcome them to the Museum of Lost Futures. It would tell them about the museum and ask them about their relationship, before inviting them into the space.

1 The Waiting Room

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Audio used with permission from Ciaran Clarke, Mwenza Blell, Leah Lockhart, Leonie Rowland and Dean Pomeroy.

There, they'd enter the museum properly, filled with objects from potential futures, histories, other worlds—or even our world. Some of the objects that produced the strongest reactions in people were things they couldn't quite tell if they were real. The "See it. Say It. Sorted." poster, for example, uses text that is on real posters that live in train stations across the country. Some people were sure this related to some other world than our own. Living in sort-of-fiction in this way helped to expand people's possibilities of what the world could be.

Whenever people touched an object, a story would play from someone involved with the object's history.

Then the pair was invited to take an object that resonated with them into the dining room, where they would take it in turns to ask each other questions:

• What kind of world is this object from? What is its story?
• Why did this object speak to you?
• Where are the chains in your life? What keeps you small?
• What haunts you about your world?
• What must crumble for you to have the life you need?
• What patterns have you noticed [in the other person]? What do you wish for them? What do they need to hear?

Finally, people were asked to move into the theatre, where they would watch a message from the pair who had been through the museum before them, write a message to their future selves about how they keep building the future they want to build, and record a message to the next pair to go through the museum.

What we learned 

Some things were unclear about the experience, and we had some technical problems, but none of these seemed to ruin the experience for people. A lot of people had profoundly impactful experiences in the Museum—perhaps more than we were even expecting. People reflected on their hopes, fears, and dreams, and the closeness of the relationship between the two people attending often made the conversation in the dining room incredibly vulnerable and intimate. People cried, hugged each other, held hands, and left the Museum with more hope and understanding than they entered with.

Placing objects from potential worlds/futures/histories alongside objects from our world introduced an uncertainty to the experience that was destabilising for people—to great effect. We refer to this as semi-fiction, and we feel that it really helps people to enter into an imaginative and possibility-centric space, as it makes people aware that even our own world and present reality is constructed. If something is constructed, it can be deconstructed, and we can build something new.

Immersive experiences have a great potential for helping people to feel new things and connect these to new imaginaries of the future. It's more critical than ever to help people develop their ability to imagine something different than our current world. We especially think it's really important that people are able to develop an embodied sense of what hope feels like, of noticing what the chains in their life feel like, and to notice how they are haunted. We can only build new worlds by confronting what is "to be done" about our haunting (as Avery Gordon puts it). Immersive experiences can weave together designed objects, facilitation through card games, and stories told through audio soundscapes. Using all of these methods at once more richly helps to build someone's possibility landscape.

What we made 

We made: 

• An immersive experience called the Museum of Lost Futures
• Several objects from potential worlds, including a Gamete Donation Kit, surveillance posters, an instruction manual for a crime detection camera, and a letter from a future justice system
• A story that ran throughout the experience
• A soundscape that guided people through the experience

What's next?

We'll be going back to people involved in the project soon to ask if they'd like to participate in its next stage, which will remind them of the messages they sent into the future to themselves, and see how these intentions are playing out several months later. We're exploring this as a speculative way to explore longer-term impacts of individual events.

A campaigning organisation.

The brief 

In 2019, the organisation started work to develop a vision, mission and values. The work was interrupted by the pandemic and a turnover in staff. They wanted us to help them pick the work back up from where they left off, to complete the vision, mission and values, and to develop a theory of change around them. 

Our offer 

• Revisit previous vision, mission and values work 
• Create a related theory of change 
• Facilitate in-person workshops with staff to develop all the material 

What we did

We started the project by having one-to-one interviews with all staff to get their ideas and views about the previous vision, mission and values. We pseudonymised and synthesised the interviews to get a landscape view of opinions and to prioritise areas of work. We shared the synthesised research with staff three weeks before our first face-to-face workshop so they could have time to think and come prepared with refined ideas and questions for their colleagues. We also wrote detailed workshop agendas and provided links to collaborative working spaces three weeks before the first workshop. 

We designed two back-to-back workshops: day one focussed on collaboratively editing and refining the vision, mission and values content and day two was more time to focus on the values, and start the theory of change work. We started each workshop with a creative activity unrelated to the vision, mission, values or theory of change to help people settle in and we provided fidgets, mandala colouring pages and lots of different pens and pencils for regulating throughout the workshops. We introduced a simplified consent decision-making process, which was the foundation of all our discussions for the two days. Our two facilitators split roles with one leading the discussion and the other keeping notes and updating documents in a shared Google folder- this allowed everyone to see documentation as it changed in real time. 

What we learned 

This was one of our favourite pieces of work in 2023. It was full of confusion, challenges, laughter, intelligence and love. More than any other client-facing work we’ve done, this project allowed us to step fully into the emergent strategy elements and principles we hold so dear. We were reminded that following our instincts and staying true to the ways we want to practise will be alright, even if at times it feels too far outside expected ways of working or means we have to scale back on deliverables. 

We were also reminded that there are so many different assumptions and expectations about group facilitation, especially when a group has variable regular contact and when full, everyday workplace context is unknown to facilitators. We feel we had a safe enough relationship with this client to signal course changes when they were needed or when they emerged and we are very grateful for that! 

What we made 

We made: 

• A package of shared documents and resources 
• New drafts of the vision, mission and two out of four values
• Foundations for a theory of change 
• A write up of all our activity from workshop design to the final workshop, including guidance and materials for the group to continue work on the final values and the theory of change

A partnership team working across central government and the third sector. 

The brief

Both teams had recently experienced staff changes which impacted the dynamic of the group. They were experiencing some misalignment and they wanted our help to bring people together to get to know each other better, and to understand where issues and frictions might be coming from. We were asked to design and facilitate a half-day workshop. 

Our offer 

• Bring in games or play to help people have discussions
• Structure conversations that allow everyone to share their story 
• Hold space for everyone to feel safe enough to express themselves 

What we did

We started with individual hour-long interviews with the different team leads, which helped us understand the landscape, experiences, and points of view. From these discussions we could see there were various histories and entry points into the project and, generally, people in both teams were not feeling recognised or respected. We decided to take an appreciative storytelling approach to allow everyone to see each other’s stories and contributions to the project. 

To settle into the workshop, we started with an ideation game using a deck of cards we created. We then split the group into their respective organisational teams to collectively map the story of the project from their point of view. We then brought the groups together to see the stories side by side so they could identify similarities, differences and ask each other questions. The discussion was quite difficult at times but it allowed everyone the chance to air grievances, address misunderstandings, and eventually, work together to come up with ideas for different ways of working in the future. It is a privilege to be present with a group of people who are working through difficult things. With this project, we were reminded how important it is for teams to make time to just be together and listen to each other, and how important facilitation is in that process. 

What we learned 

This piece of work was a nice opportunity for us to be together in-person as co-facilitators. We learned more about how each of us responds to on-the-fly changes to plans and then how we support each other as changs happen. We were able to really tune into each other’s body language and create conditions where we felt safe enough to say what we needed when things cropped up. It gave us a lot of energy to see how well we work together! 

We learned that in the future we need to be clearer to clients about how our outputs are documented and presented, and our boundaries around requests for editing and redactions.  

What we made 

We created:

• a card deck for creative, speculative ideation exercises
• two story maps
• a report documenting the workshop design process and our notes from the conversations in the room, including action points

A central government team that supports public services to publish open data. For this project, we were subcontracted by Open Data Services Cooperative (ODSC).

The brief 

Design and facilitate a series of workshops to find out what people in public services need to publish more open data. Share information from the workshops with ODSC, who would be writing up a final report with workshop findings, global case study insights, and recommendations. 

Our offer 

• Workshop design- thinking about the best discussion structure, length, and tools for gathering insightful and actionable information from workshop participants
• Workshop facilitation- we provided a discussion guide and ‘backstage’ workshop support for each session, probing where necessary, and capturing quotes, ideas and issues live

What we did

After learning more about the client’s needs, we decided to approach the work as a lightweight discovery.  We spent a number of weeks in weekly check-ins clarifying purpose with the client, while in the background organising workshop assets, and setting up and administering the workshop booking system before holding our first session. We worked closely with ODSC to understand their approach to the case study research they were carrying out so we could align their conceptual framework in the workshops.  

Each workshop session was held on Zoom with a Miro board on a shared screen. The discussion guide worked through the Miro board with participants and took notes, while the workshop support transcribed quotes on a separate part of the board. After each workshop, we synthesised data in the session space, then synthesised that together with all the other workshop data. We exported each session’s data to a spreadsheet that we shared with the client as soon as possible. Toward the end of the project, we held 1:1 interviews with people who could not take part in the workshops.

What we learned

Facilitation will never be the simple act of rounding up a group of folk, setting up a flipchart, and walking people through an agenda. We needed to remind ourselves there is often a lot of work that might need to be done before a facilitation project gets going. This project needed sharpening and definition before we could get to the work of choosing structures, planning workshops and promoting the event. 

We made assumptions about who would lead administrative tasks like event listings and registration. We assumed these would be handled by the client as part of their ongoing community of practice engagement work, which ended up not being the case! We hadn’t explicitly budgeted time for the back office work that we ended up putting into this piece of work, which put a strain on one member of our team. It feels like a rookie move now, but lesson learned about getting right up front about participant interface admin responsibilities.

What we made 

We took time to work with the client to create a clearer brief and purpose which made it easier for us to design workshops around. We created  a research plan, workshop designs, interview and survey questions, and themed data from the workshops in different formats. We managed administration and communication with workshop and interview participants, and fed into the final project report.

A large national children’s charity. 

The brief 

A critique on the call for research tendering process from the perspective of a potential bidder. The client was noticing their invitations to tender (ITT) for qualitative research were not getting the traction they wanted. Additionally, some outputs they’d had from research tendered using their existing invitation were not what they’d hoped for. 

Our offer 

• Critical friendship- taking a critical eye to the client’s process and reflecting issues back to them with kindness and support
• Document redesign- rewriting the ITT in order to provide a jumping off place for further refinement with internal stakeholders
• Guidance- detailed notes and suggestions for tone, style and standpoint 

What we did

Our general process for working through the document was to do a close pair reading through each section and note down potential issues from our perspective as ‘ghost’ bidders. We then collated these into a general list of themes. We identified areas of potential duplication, confusion, and overlap. We did some desk research to find examples of tendering and commissioning that had more relational and friendly approaches.

As we worked through the documents, we quickly discovered there were a number of barriers to a potential bidder submitting a high-quality bid: requirements and specifications scattered throughout a 15-page document, defensive and paternalistic tone, and repetitive or extraneous requirements. 

We approached this as a piece of fractal redesign work- we saw it in service of a larger piece of work to refine the overall commissioning process.

What we learned 

In our experience, commissioning and tendering processes, especially from larger organisations, tend to be rigid, faceless, defensive, and treat potential suppliers as inherently suspicious. We started calling these standard processes ‘hazing’ because of the heavy free labour needed to write pages of text and gather multiple documents to prove worth or trustworthiness before any conversations or deeper context. Through this work, we were able to see more clearly and articulate the ways in which these types of commissioning frameworks favour larger organisations, and essentially encourage bidders to bluster. 

This has been one of our favourite projects. Reworking a rigid ITT with a client who was very open to change and confronting the ways their organisation was presenting itself to potential suppliers was very energising. We had beautiful, open conversations with the client about how it actually sees its partnerships, and the internal departmental mismatches that can make commissioning more complicated than straightforward. 

The downside of this project has been that now we’ve seen there is a much kinder and simpler way to commission, going through the typical tendering processes is more frustrating for us now! 

What we made 

We created a whole new ITT document and design commentary guidance for the client to reference for creating tenders in the future. The design commentary acts as a kind of writing guide wiith suggestions about tone and document structures that emphasise entering into a trusting reciprocal relationship with a supplier. We rewrote the ITT using our own design commentary and managed to reduce the document by more than half. The new ITT turned the original on its head by putting the context of the work and bid requirements right up front in simple and clear terms. We stripped out all repitition and extraneous bid requirments, and made a huge reduction in the long prose the organisation used to talk about itself.