02 Jul Welcome to our COMUNiTI
At the heart of what we do, has been, and always will be, the desire to create spaces that are responsive to the unique needs, values and goals of the organisations we work with and that together through our partnerships we can shape a space that is underpinned by the shared values of the community within it.
And it is for these reasons that MARSDEN Collective and the brand that brought us to this point over the past 5 years, is needing to evolve, to take us into the next 5 years and beyond. We needed to take a broader view of the skills and services that we provide, beyond that of design and embrace what makes us unique and our ability to foster the creation of communities.
It isn’t without great planning and deep self-reflection that we have come to this revelation. Over the past 12 months we have been on a journey that has seen us explore our organisational structure, the role of design led thinking, our purpose and our brand to really dig deep into who we are and why we exist. It’s only from this intensive work that we have been able to identify that we are aspiring to something much greater, and we are now able to express this vision through the transformation of our brand.
At the core of this journey has been the expression of our purpose. The story of purpose started a while ago for me and over the years it’s become clearer and stronger, and people who share in that vision for what’s possible, have joined me.
To me design isn’t about how pretty a space is. It’s about how that space connects people, how it makes people feel. I used to describe it as wanting people to love to going to work as much as I did. I wanted them to feel excited about their work environment. To love it!
I learned that without purpose you can never be successful. And that making money is not a purpose… Money has never motivated me, making people love where they work did.
The other thing that I learned on this journey was the power of mindset and the strength of community, through a leadership immersion program in Malawi with The Hunger Project. It’s also where the seed for the brand evolution began, yet I wouldn’t know it till more recently.
What makes The Hunger Project different from other aid organisations is their ability to empower people to instigate their own change. They don’t give them money, food or clothes. They give them a vision of what the future could be, a world without poverty, without disease, with access to water, to health care and to education. They facilitate villages to find solutions to their own challenges through education, workshops and the power of the group. They change their view of the world. They change their mindset.
The thing that has stayed with me is the amazingly strong sense of community that I witnessed in these villages. They were so proud, so supportive of each other. Everyone was treated with respect, the opportunity to have an opinion to be heard. They shared what little they had and no truer than here was the analogy “It takes a village to raise a child”. A deep sense of community was what connected the people. A shared set of values and beliefs for how they saw the world.
In sharing this experience with my team, we felt we have the opportunity in every project we do, to influence the creation of communities. To influence how people feel and to influence how people behave in the spaces we create to empower them to live their fullest life, to find their tribes, their own communities.
Imagine what we could achieve if we bought this approach to every project we touched. And with this approach what types of projects we could be part of?
We believe that where ever people meet and interact a community is formed. The shared values, experiences and stories are what give these communities a collective sense of meaning, pride and belonging.
The work that we have been doing over the last few years has only strengthened this resolve. We’ve been:
1. Envisioning the master planning of a suburban shopping centre in a food & beverage laneway precinct
2. Identifying the most ideal location for our client to relocate their head office based on staff, clients, logistics and transport
3. Reimagining a food court concept to create something new and unique to Brisbane
4. Guiding a local government through a change transformation project to consolidate their workforce
Each of these projects has called on a wide variety of skills that traverse various industries flanking what was and will remain to be our core competency of design, however it is with a much broader focus of establishing deeper connections with space for the people that occupy them.
It’s about ensuring that with each project we are fostering the creation of communities where people feel connected to the space and to one another.
So it is with great pleasure that I introduce to you our new brand, our new future… COMUNiTI and I warmly welcome you to our community.
The Creation of Connected Communities
with our panel of speakers from the perspectives of organisational psychology, health & wellbeing, personal leadership and spatial design.