A pattern emerges

We’ve been doing some brisk soul-searching at Nesta to really figure out what it is we can offer people.

At an away day last week all Nesta staff were asked to bring a picture which for them summed up what Nesta does. Here’s an example of one of the slightly chaotic posters we created:

A turbulent Nesta mindmap

(Ruth had the best explanation with her Transformers picture: “We may look a bit boring at first glance, but we can transform into something cool – honestly”).

All this fed neatly into my website discovery process, as I could start to map what Nesta thought of itself with what our brilliant non-Nesta card sorters thought of what we actually produced.

Over the past week we’ve had some really helpful and creative people who have given up their lunch hour to help me and Sara (my trusty deputy) figure out the Nesta information puzzle.

Card sorters gallery of fame

Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck and their team from Entrepreneur First were brilliant, and slightly ruthless, in sorting out the Nesta brain. Alice at one point shouted out: “You guys do a lot of really random stuff!”. Exactly.

James Lush from Biochemistry Society, Alice Clay from City of London Festival and Peter Feltham from Ethos Valuable Outcomes were great at piecing things together, and coming up with creative solutions for the IA – especially the idea of a random button that summons up a random article from the archive.

And finally design researcher Svenja Bickert, artist Carys Davies and creative professional Dina Gitziou found some interesting patterns in what we did and grouped things by looking at what outputs and take aways we produce.

The card sort, correlated

I promised you I’d share everything with you as I went in this project, so here is the final correlated Excel spreadsheet showing how all the cards got sorted into standardised categories. (WARNING: I found standardising is the hardest part of a card sort – don’t oversimplify your categories if you can help it).

Let me know what patterns you see: