Boccalatte reinvented Screen Producers Australia by repositioning its overall offering, re-naming the organisation and reimagining a new visual language and identity to support the transition. It also involved a full rethinking of its annual international conference Screen Forever.
Tim Brown of IDEO suggested that design needs to play a bigger role than just creating pretty, fashionable little objects. He called for a shift to collaborative and participatory design thinking and he illustrated this with Brunel, who built the UK railroad and steamship service to Eastern Europe. Brunel's genius is that didn’t just focus on the design of railroads and steamships; ‘he imagined an integrated transportation system in which it would be possible for a passenger to embark on a train in London and disembark from a ship in New York’. Brunel was interested in the entire consumer experience, in other words a broader view.
We, too, were more concerned with Screen Producers Australia’s integration into the broader international landscape. Screen Producers Australia is self-defined as ‘the home of producers, whether it be television, film, digital’. What all these mediums have in common is that they are producers of screen content, a fact that had become lost over the years as a result of discrete internal machinations.
Design, we believe, needs to be more adaptive and transformative because the problems clients need to solve are changing and environments are becoming more complex. We need a way to understand, engage and inspire audiences and to sustain the experience or brand. Our approach is to take a holistic view of the problems faced in order to understand the culture and context.
Rebranding Screen Producers Australia was more than creating a logo or an identity, it was about creating a point of view. A deep exploration and understanding of the internal and external culture and the relationship between the people in the organisation and a dialogue with their audience. It was only once we understood this that we could facilitate the conversations to inspire Screen Producers Australia to imagine what its future could look like.
A 20% increase in attendance at the all-new Screen Forever conference in its first year, which provided clear proof of the pudding. It was George Bernard Shaw who said, ‘Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything’. We have to agree.