At work
In-house and in partnerships, Turnstone completes projects with a network of collaborators: designers, technologists, social innovators, creative agencies and individuals. Work featured here highlights where Turnstone – as visual storyteller, creative place-maker and design strategist – has significant impact, transforming business, public space, and civil society.
Turnstone makes places meaningful to people: By developing a museum identity, site-specific or citywide wayfinding signage systems, revitalizing a world-class tourist destination, activating nightlife, inspiring design responses to urban disaster, and rethinking mass transit services, Turnstone articulates the potential as actual for public and commercial spaces, shaping better experiences of the built environment for everyone.
Turnstone sets direction for design interventions in key industries, municipal, media, culture, retail, technology, financial services, and other sectors: By interpreting business requirements fit for a creative brief, gathering research insights, recommending the right team, tools, methods and approach, Turnstone treats design as a verb, defining success criteria at the outset of a project to deliver effective outcomes.
From concept to completion, Turnstone's work focuses on all the people it impacts. Fostering input from all project stakeholders, this end-to-end participatory approach unpacks client and community aspirations and actively listens to those whose lives and jobs the client's interventions will transform. Since good experience matters for staff as well as the public, this is design for all, promoting and activating friction-free, fair (and sometimes even fun) interactions between people, places and products.
Strategic designers embrace and accommodate the recently possible. Trained to speculate and give form to what's next, Turnstone helps clients tolerate constant change and uncertainty. Across increasingly precarious social, economic, technological, environmental contexts, Turnstone's future-oriented projects variously conceive, anticipate, rehearse shuffled priorities, breakthroughs, planned adaptations, fast and slow emergencies and their consequences.
Turnstone recognizes the value of visual communication in business, politics as well as in the arts: By drawing as a graphic facilitator, by listening actively and charting complexity in simple pictures, through film, animation and live illustration, Turnstone gives form to narrative, telling stories that ensure that executives, leaders and other creatives get the right message in the right medium.
Visual communication plays a crucial role in business and policy: Decision-makers can struggle when they can't see their processes, products, programs. During discovery work, and as a graphic facilitator, Turnstone investigates and maps the 'plumbing' of client challenges - a layered organization, an intricate public space, a multi-purpose building, a smart, dynamic system. With curiosity and optimism, Turnstone helps executives and team leaders establish a clearer view and better understanding of current conditions, to build confidence in strategic plans and to spot opportunities for building resilience in ever-changing contexts.
