Hi, I’m Bandana!
I am a Sr. Strategic Designer and Researcher.
I use expressive, creative and design methods to learn about people’s real experiences, to help organizations build services and products that reflect real needs.
Projects & Testimonials
“What truly sets Bandana apart is her exceptional ability to work through ambiguity.”
“…excellent, clear, consistent communication probably being the most outstanding element she brought to the table. We always knew where we stood at any moment, what was our “next step”, and it seemed to me she related to all involved with equal professionalism and generosity.”
“…Clients were in their early stages of development, this was critical and it really helped that The Cultivation Of immediately connected with that context and understood how to run with it.”
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Based in Seatle, Substantial (now Optimistic Design) is a human-centered, equity based design and insights studio. Learn more about my approach leading design strategy and design research for two large, multi-stakeholder US client projects.
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hcma is an interdisciplinary design firm based in Vancouver. They house ‘Tilt,’ a curiosity lab that asks provocative questions, collaborates with community and explores new ways of being together. Learn about leading Tilt through Covid, and how design research created experience pillars for a beloved lab.
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Brampton is one of the fastest growing cities in Canada, and their non-profit sector supports hundreds of thousands of residents each year. Learn more about the design research involving both elected officials and community members, including the rebrand and relaunch of their largest community granting program in under 18 months.
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POPS are ‘privately owned, public spaces.’ plazaPOPS works to create temporary installations in suburban parking lots/underused spaces for placemaking. Learn about the co-created space for the plazaPOPS board to envision their future moving from being experimental collective to becoming an established organization.
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I play distorted guitars and wanted to learn about the experiences of other artists in scenes that influenced my own sound.
This was an independent artist driven project to document experiences of punk musicians and community members in Toronto, Los Angeles and Mumbai.
Listen to the audio interviews with photography, where interviews touched on aggression, gender and tradition in these different interconnected scenes.
Read the Vice/Noisey article highlighting featured artist Urvah Khan's experiences as a member of a punk diaspora.
Why Expression & Creative practices are Key to Every Strategy
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Did you feel validated, seen, cared for, understood, connected? Were you more or less likely to use that service or buy that offering? Making use of expression based design activities can hep us create trusting experiences for all members partaking in a product or service - whether it’s the board setting the strategy, the team building the solution, or the people who ultimately have their lives impacted by the experience. Being heard is fundamental to any exchange of value.
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Building with and for our customers, clients, patients, constituents, community members is how we know that our product or service is needed, and wanted. People deserve to have agency in the decisions that affect their lives. Building the time and space for expressive practices ensures that the real people we serve, and their experiences, are included in every step of our collective decision making.
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Projecting a map of a shared future requires us to learn about what’s happened to date, how those experiences made us feel, and how those feelings influenced our decisions. Using creative methods we can identify those touchpoints and explore how they change us. Shared futures are built collaboratively, and we need the space and time to better understand each others experiences. This can help us envision all the different ways we can bridge what has been in the past, with what can be in the future.
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Even with the best data, the future is uncertain. The current environment of massive technological, social and political change makes even our current position feel ambiguous. Using techniques from creative practices helps us create space to take ideas apart, test how new directions might feel, and build a shared imagination. Even if the far future remains murky, we can still collectively project our next best step forward.
Services
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Design research makes use of people's actual experiences. We can learn about these experiences through creative methods such as workshops, facilitation methods, qualitative interviews and prototyping as well as traditional quantitative methods such as surveying and analysis.
These methods help us look at an issue, challenge or opportunity from many different points of view. The synthesis of which provides strategic direction, opportunities to build new prototypes, and move towards new ways of collectively acting towards a solution.
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Designing experiences for staff, clients, customers and community members that may only be one or a few days long, but workshops have impact that will be felt long after the workshop is complete.
Special consideration is given when embedding expressive and creative practices into different spaces and audiences, to ensure that content, delivery format and impact are participant appropriate.
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Artists and creative professionals can be embedded into different types of teams or projects to bring new methods, experiences or perspectives to your work and enhance user impact. If you're currently working with artists, or considering it, The Cultivation Of can support you with providing advisory, project/program management with best practices for working with artists and creative professionals.
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Sometimes it's helpful to have an outside set of eyes on your project plans when integrating design thinking or creative practices into your research, strategy or projects.
Do you or your clients need a bit of perspective on the plans, processes or potential outcomes of your work?
TCO can act as a sounding board and help you work through process and evaluation of your plans, OR directly support the production of pilots and prototyping.
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The most fun and simultaneously important part of design and expressive practices, is play!
Has your team gotten a bit stuck? Or a touch unmotivated?
Does your research practice require a new lens or experience to help ground synthesis?
Are you just interested in testing out different creative methods for research, strategy and design?
All research and strategic work is cognitively heavy can occasionally require play can make a team feel re-inspired and feel cognitively refreshed, especially for projects working on solving deeply complex or long-term problems.
TCO can develop virtual or in-person experiences that directly connect to your project teams goals to help refresh and restore the delight or eureka! moments for continued collaborations.