Close up shot of Rachael Wakefield-Rann, sitting on a balcony in front of a forest
Rachael: I think having shared and genuine understandings of the problems, and the types of approaches that would work to solving them, is by far the biggest challenge.
Close up shot of Luke Bacon, sitting on a couch in front of a painting and a curtain
Luke: There’s been a real problem or kind of issue linking some of the good research that goes on with actually getting it used by organisations to take better action.
Close up shot of Grace Young, sitting on a balcony in a repurposed industrial warehouse
Grace: What’s the sustainable option and how do we make that as easy as we can for people, so that it becomes the natural choice rather than the “hard choice” or the thing I have to “give up things” to be able to take.
Close up shot of Rachael
Rachael: I’m Rachael and I work at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at UTS and I help work on sustainability transitions.
Close up shot of Grace
Grace: I’m Grace Young and I’m the Chief Innovation Officer at Wattwatchers
Close up shot of Luke
Luke: I’m Luke, I’m a co-founder of the Research and Action Hub.
Medium shot of Luke
Luke: The research wasn’t really being driven by the need for strategic action, so it wasn’t really asking the kinds of questions or produced in the sort of way that would really support strategic action.
Close up shot of Luke
Luke: It then isn’t really effectively communicated to the key people who are acting because, fairly often, the researchers are not the same people who are kind of leading strategic action or really in the best position to act.
Medium shot of Luke
Luke: And then, on the other side, that research really isn’t frequently picked up in a really effective way by people who are well positioned to act.
Medium shot of Rachael
Rachael: I think I got to a point where I became frustrated with having to just produce outputs that were just reports and academic papers and just thinking, ‘Nobody’s reading this. What can we do?’
Close up shot of Grace
Grace: We’re always looking at designing solutions that are meeting the kind of needs or the interests of the person, rather than necessarily just assuming, ‘Well, if we provide them the information they will change their behaviour.’
Close up shot of Luke, followed by a shot of a visualisation on a laptop, with a hand gesturing towards the screen
Luke: Our focus was really on powerful visualisations that would communicate what we do…
Close up shot of Luke
Luke: …and, you know, just an example of how valuable that’s been, I think it maybe was five months after I’d had this initial meeting…
Close up of a person’s hand roughly sketching the same diagram that was shown on the laptop
Luke: …I met this guy again I was like ‘Oh, you know, we had this meeting months ago; I’m not sure if you remember me?” and said “Hang on, wait a second!” and he found a piece of paper, and grabbed a pen, and he actually drew back to me the diagram that we’d made with Parallel Lines to describe our organisation…
Close up shot of Luke
Luke: …and it was just such a moment of, like… my God! It’s actually helping people understand quite a complex idea and I think they learn something through it.
Medium shot of Rachael
Rachael: Language does seem a bit insufficient a lot of the time and it’s not until someone external comes in and tries to draw what the problem is and then everyone goes, ‘No that wasn’t my understanding of the problem!’ and then someone says ‘Oh, but that was my understanding.’ So it’s been enormously valuable in getting everyone within our team on the same page and thinking through the problems in a really different way, which is a really amazing and unexpected benefit of having designers kind of embedded in the process, not just of making the products kind of engaging and look nice, but actually thinking through the problem of the research questions itself.
Medium shot of Grace
Grace: One of the things that I look for in a designer and specifically that I looked for with Parallel Lines is to bring that expertise around these different ways and models of working to bear on the problems that we have … and it was really wonderful to kind of express to the team that that’s the power of design.
Various shots of people in a design workshop
Grace: It’s about engaging people in conversation to work out their own stuff, rather than trying to tell them what to do. This kind of concept was really, really powerful.
Medium shot of Grace
Grace: It shifted people’s thinking about ‘What does visualisation mean?’ ‘What does information design mean?’
Close up of a person viewing a page of visualisations on a digital tablet
Rachael: I think the thing that design brought was a kind of solution to that problem…
Medium shot of Rachael
Rachael: …and just having an understanding of what those alternatives are, and the ways they can engage people differently…
Close up of the visualisations on the digital tablet
Rachael: …and how to design different types of documents or other outputs to suit your audience…
Close up shot of Rachael
Rachael: …has made me think a lot more about who I’m reaching through my work and how—and who I want to be reaching, as well.
Shot of the Parallel Lines logo on a blue background
