Taryn Niesena

Offbeat Summit BTK

Offbeat Summit is a concept book I created using service design methods to mimic an employees journey leading up and into a 2-day, fictional, internal employee event.

Service design methods enabled me to looks at the design of the event from a user point of view. This was studied through applied ethnography, observing and engage the users in the design process in order to create a deep understanding of their needs before, during and after the event. By doing this I was able to determine the appropriate service channels to meet their needs.

Event Objectives

The 2 objectives from a stakeholder perspective are to humanize the company and secondly to emphasizethe importance of employees to their team.

Humanize the company

As startups scale, personalisation from leaders decreases. When leaders knew everyone’s names, the tight deadlines were easy to swallow because the “why” we do what we do was an everyday conversational topic. With a need to keep tight deadlines and stay ahead in the industry a companies story and its leaders need to be humanized to the employees that don’t know them personally. This includes failure, risks, authenticity and challenges. 

Emphasizing the importance of employees to their team and their team to the company

Showing value to employees gets more difficult as a company grows. So instead to show the value of a team to a company’s growth and then show the value of an individual to their team could be more memorable. Building on the “offbeat” nature of how the company began and continues to grow the event should celebrate risk-takers

Each section is separated with values expressed through future attendee quotes. This keeps the focus of each section on the "why."