Collaborating with clients

Male 1: I love clients. I need to openly acknowledge that without a client, we don't have a way to push against new opportunity itself. The client is the key to both providing the platform, but also having the insights from their own expertise that allows us to do our work. Some clients like one idea right down the middle, don't complicate things. But some clients are very hands on and they say don't hide you know, all of the other ideas behind the one final one. Show us everything. And we like that too. We like to be able to show them you know, three or six or a dozen ideas and to say which one is resonating with you? Or what parts of different ones do we like better? And it's really like just a big open question and challenge. And more and more we get those types of projects. We get projects where people say, yes, we have projects with signage and we're engaging that. But we have a bigger problem with visitor experience. Like how do people just think about our institution in general or walk through it? And so for us we need that client expertise, ingenuity, and thought leadership to help pull us forward and to give us permission to go into lots and lots of radical spaces that eventually we'll then hand to the client to own. That's the key is that if they don't own it, for real. On a deep level. With a, with a considered understanding of the technology. Of the approach. Of the strategy and how it's supposed to work. It's just not going to work period. We're not interested, in developing things, that win design awards but fail eventually for the client. That's not a long term solution. For any design firm. And we always wanted to do beautiful amazing things that inspired our clients, but that serviced our clients and that really forwarded exactly what they were looking to do. And to do that, you need to be a good listener. You need to really, really engage deep with the clients and get inside of their world So that you can provide something that will actually forward their practice.