Michael Crouch Innovation Centre (UNSW)
In 2016 we were invited to become Catalysts-in-Residents of the new Michael Crouch Innovation Centre (MCIC). Our role was to support Brad Furber, COO, in delivering on the co-designed one-page strategic plan. The plan outlined the core values, purpose and mission of the MCIC as well as a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) of becoming the leading university-based innovation network in Asia-Pacific by 2025.
We spent 18 months in residency at MCIC working closely with Brad to implement this strategy. Our contribution to the strategy included developing a strong custom brand identity driven by the core purpose, a digital strategy, historical documentation and a series of artefacts designed to embed the MCIC in the UNSW landscape and position it as an innovative, cutting edge innovation facility.
Services:
Brand strategy
Visual identity
Co-design
Web design
MG Taylor DesignShop
In January of 2016 members of the APAC innovation precinct (our team included) gathered at the MCIC for a 3 day DesignShop lead by Matt and Gail Taylor. The purpose of the intense interaction being to design V2.0 of the MCIC by creating context, scoping out the next 10 years by creating a scaffolding and a plan. Over the 3 days the group dissected the university’s newly launched 2025 strategy and designed a response from the MCIC in the form of a one-page-strategic-plan.
In essence, the goal was to explore and articulate the role that the MCIC could play in helping transform UNSW Sydney from a very good Australian university into a truly great global university - Australia’s global university.
Testimonial
“The WordPlay Studio team take their craft seriously, investing time and energy to deeply explore and digest our organization’s core values, purpose and built environment.”
Brad Furber, COO – Michael Crouch Innovation Centre
Designing an identity
The Michael Crouch Innovation Centre (MCIC) is the newest force driving innovation within the UNSW landscape, lead by COO, Brad Furber. MCIC aims to incubate purposeful projects and programs that empower a community of makers, hackers, speakers, thinkers, doers, mentors, experts and of course beginners, sparking a problem-solving mentality that can influence and contribute to the emerging ideas economy here in Australia and beyond.
The ethos is simple yet powerful: to make a positive change in society, bringing together cross-disciplinary teams to help solve real world problems. One not only needs their minds to think, dream and speak about change, but also their hands to tinker, test, and build to create change.
Our aim was to create an identity system that represented the core purpose of “an emergent force, fostering innovation to create a better world”. The challenge was to design future-ready branding, whilst working within the existing UNSW brand landscape.
Our insight for this rebrand was inspired by the built environment of the MCIC, drawing on the binary architecture and the legacy of Matt and Gail and the MCIC community during their in-house residency in 2016.
The space is University-enabled and community-powered, working in the background to facilitate change and inspire a new way of working within the walls of UNSW.
